Vinayak Bhavnani, Co-Founder and CTO of India-based bus transport technology company Chalo, shares how Google Maps Platform is used to improve visibility for commuters and bus operators across India by visualizing geospatial data.

Effective public transport networks contribute to the local economy and help make cities safe, pleasant, and sustainable. In India, buses make up around 90% of the public transport offering, but when you talk to the people who ride them every day, you find that there’s a lot of room for improvement. Heavy traffic means there are rarely any fixed schedules and it’s impossible to know exactly when your bus is coming. We’ve found that people tend to wait at a bus stop for up to 30 minutes a day, which creates a lot of frustration and wasted time.

When we founded Chalo, our aim was to make the daily city commute a more positive experience. Reliability is synonymous with visibility: when you know exactly when the bus is coming, you can plan your day better. If you’re in your office, for example, and see the next bus is in 10 minutes, you can be at the stop at the exact time it arrives, instead of waiting around. To enable this, we base our solutions on richly-detailed geospatial data provided by Google Maps Platform.

Eliminating wait times and increasing revenue with geospatial data

In India, bus passengers tend to have fewer resources. The Chalo App, which can be downloaded for free, allows them to see exactly where their bus is on its route and when it will arrive at their nearest stop. They also tend to be late adopters of mobile technology, meaning we had to create an interface that was user-friendly, reassuring and adapted to all age groups and backgrounds. One of the main reasons we opted for Google Maps Platform is that it’s very present in India and other emerging markets and is familiar to our users, which inspires trust. At the same time, we like the fact that Google Maps Platform provides rich geospatial data while being simple to implement and work with. We use the Geocoding API, Reverse Geocoding, and the Directions API to enable location search and provide directions.

We also worked with MediaAgility to identify the Google Maps Platform products most suited to our needs and the best practices to be followed. This helped to ensure that our business objectives could be met efficiently.

The Chalo App also enables digital ticketing, alongside the Chalo Card, a payment card for those who don’t own a smartphone. India, like the rest of the world, is gradually moving away from cash payments, but the public transport system is proving slow to catch up, meaning people still must have cash in hand when they board the bus. Digital ticketing not only makes commuting more convenient, it also helps protect passengers, drivers and conductors during the COVID-19 health crisis by limiting physical contact. 

Chalo also offers solutions aimed at bus operators that help them improve their services and their bottom line. In major Indian cities, buses are run by a combination of public and private agencies and small private individual bus operators, with the majority of the latter only operating one or two buses. The market is very fragmented and there’s not much incentive for bus operators to invest in infrastructure or customer experience – especially when they have little to no visibility on where their fleet is at a given time, how many kilometers it travels in a day, or how much money it takes. 

The Chalo dashboard provides operators with a map-based real-time overview of bus locations, alongside scheduling features and route, ticketing, and passenger statistics. Geospatial intelligence and insight into passenger demand enable operators to explore new avenues of revenue and adapt routes and services to passenger needs. Operators who’ve partnered with Chalo report an average improvement of 10% to 30% of their bus fleet operations.

Chalo is currently powering about 100 million rides a month on 15,000 buses in 37 cities. We’d like to see the number of rides increase tenfold over the next few years. To do that, we’re looking to broaden our offer and expand to other parts of the country and across international borders. A pilot is underway in Bangkok, and we’re considering expansion into South-East Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Having access to detailed geospatial data anywhere in the world via Google Maps Platform, without having to make any major investments or changes to our technology stack, will make this considerably easier. 

At the same time, we’re exploring artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve the accuracy of our scheduling features and we’re introducing video-based solutions for people-counting on buses. Our aim is to continually improve our offering and optimize our services. We’re looking forward to working closely with Google to make that happen.  

For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.

As Google’s productivity adviser, I’ve been closely following the evolving discussion around the future of work. Long before the pandemic, employees, business leaders, and analysts were already thinking about how work needed to evolve, but the crisis brought the future cascading  into the present. Virtually overnight, millions of companies and workers went remote and stayed that way for over a year, pushing their collaboration and productivity tools to the test across living rooms and time zones. While some organizations were able to launch new solutions or adapt existing ones to keep their people connected and productive, many struggled. 

The organizations that struggled quickly discovered their tools weren’t complete, scalable, secure, or built for the cloud era. Meanwhile, across all industries and business types, employees reported spikes in burnout, feelings of disconnection, and frustration with finding the latest information or using unfamiliar tools.

With many businesses headed into a hybrid model, the world of work has been transformed, possibly forever. There’s a fresh and fast-moving conversation about how organizations can succeed within the evolving future of work. 

But at the center of that discussion are two familiar topics: collaboration and productivity. How will they evolve in an era of distributed teams and surging employee demand for  flexibility? And how will businesses meet expectations to innovate quickly and deliver on rising customer expectations while navigating the new future of work? 

Although 2020 was a major inflection point, a closer look reveals that many of the technologies, trends, and cultural norms shaping the future of work have been around for some time. For years, forward-thinking organizations have been wrestling with how to maximize collaboration, productivity, and wellbeing among their employees, and they’ve been developing the tools to make it happen at scale. By that measure, the future of work has been here for some time; it just hasn’t been evenly distributed or easily visible.

With this context in mind, we’re sharing our new guide Create what’s next: The future of collaboration and productivity, which highlights three areas of focus for organizations wanting to catch up with those leading the charge to empower the future of work.

1. Making work-from-anywhere a reality with flexible solutions
2. Giving people helpful tools to maximize their impact
3. Enabling knowledge sharing and human connection

Armed with these three strategies, businesses can improve productivity and encourage innovation while better meeting the needs of their customers and their employees—now and in the years ahead.

We share some highlights from the guide in the infographic below (click to enlarge). You can also download the full guide now.

Building a strong brand in today’s hyper-competitive business environment takes vision. It also requires a flexible, easily managed approach to digital asset management (DAM), so marketing professionals and other stakeholders can easily share, store, track, and manipulate assets to build the brand.

Many of today’s leading companies, including JetBlue, Slack, TripAdvisor, Lyft, and HealthONE, rely on Brandfolder to deliver consistent, organized, and efficient brand experiences. Brandfolder provides an easy-to-use platform that can scale across an entire company with little end-user training, empowering customers to distribute digital assets wherever they are needed. Customers also gain much greater insight into how those assets are used, and how to use them more effectively in marketing campaigns and brand messaging.

“Google Cloud made it easy to build an ML platform to quickly iterate through different brand intelligence use cases and release data-driven product features into the Brandfolder platform.”

—Ajay Rajasekharan, Head of Data Science, Brandfolder

Brandfolder is constantly advancing its development efforts to introduce new data-driven features without complicating the user experience. Big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) are key to meeting customers’ unique business needs, and essential for Brandfolder to compete in the fast-moving DAM industry. To enhance these capabilities, Brandfolder sought a public cloud provider that could help it scale its data pipeline cost effectively while providing access to advanced AI technologies.

After graduating from the Techstars startup accelerator program in 2013, Brandfolder tried two other cloud providers before standardizing on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

“We saw a difference with Google Cloud from the very beginning because the interactions felt like a strategic relationship,” says Jim Hanifen, Head of Product at Brandfolder. “Google gave us startup credits and a lot of face-to-face support, which we hadn’t experienced with other cloud providers. We decided to move our entire infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform.”

Building an ML platform for brand intelligence

After performing an initial lift-and-shift migration of virtual machines (VMs) onto Compute Engine, Brandfolder built an ML platform using GCP managed services to seamlessly deliver its data products. The platform leverages Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage as the data lake, Cloud Dataproc for cloud-native Apache Spark computing clusters, Cloud Composer as the batch job scheduler, Cloud Pub/Sub as the backbone data pipeline, Container Registry to store Docker images, and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) as the application orchestrator. Cloud Dataflow brings data into the data lake and into BigQuery for analysis.

“Google Cloud made it easy to build an ML platform to quickly iterate through different brand intelligence use cases and release data-driven product features into the Brandfolder platform,” says Ajay Rajasekharan, Head of Data Science at Brandfolder, who describes the architecture in a detailed blog. “We simply ingest raw application and event data on one end and output an ML service on the other.”

“Moving to Google Cloud Platform allows us to complete more sophisticated data analysis and ML models much faster, and at a much lower cost. We can create brand-specific ML models 12x faster and get them into production quickly to address our customers’ unique business needs.”

—Brett Nekolny, Head of Engineering, Brandfolder

For many general use cases, Brandfolder does not need to build custom ML models, and instead relies on pre-trained API models from GCP. For example, it uses Vision API and Video Intelligence API to auto-tag creative assets on import to enable fast, intuitive searches across images and videos. When more product- and brand-specific modeling is required to address unique customer use cases, Brandfolder builds and trains custom ML models using its GCP pipeline or Cloud AutoML, a suite of products built on Google transfer learning and neural architecture search technology. For example, if a Brandfolder customer makes different types of grills, Brandfolder can use AutoML Vision to train a model to recognize the different grills.

“Moving to Google Cloud Platform allows us to complete more sophisticated data analysis and ML models much faster, and at a much lower cost,” explains Brett Nekolny, Head of Engineering at Brandfolder. “We can create brand-specific ML models 12x faster and get them into production quickly to address our customers’ unique business needs.”

Industry-leading security and performance

Google Cloud’s security model helps Brandfolder give existing and prospective customers peace of mind that their data will be protected. Cloud Identity & Access Management (Cloud IAM) provides enterprise-grade access control, while Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy (Cloud IAP) enables remote users to work more securely without the hassles of a VPN client. GCP also isolates cloud resources into projects, making it easy to assign permissions and keep data and VMs organized and segregated.

“With Google Cloud, everything begins and ends with security, which makes things very easy for us,” says Jim. “If we’re under a security review, we can submit a Google security white paper. If a potential customer has security concerns, we tell them we are hosted on GCP, and those concerns go away.”

To give customers even better application performance for accessing their brand assets, Brandfolder uses Cloud Memorystore, an in-memory data store service for Redis, to cache data and provide sub-millisecond data access for production applications.

“It was much easier for us to use Cloud Memorystore versus running Redis on our compute instances,” says Brett. “The high availability, replication across zones, and automatic failover with no data loss are big for us.”

Global private network interconnects between Google Cloud and the Fastly content delivery network (CDN) dramatically reduce latency, allowing Brandfolder’s customers to deliver and update even very large creative assets quickly around the world.

“What’s beautiful about the relationship between Google and Fastly is that if one of our customers uploads a new version of an asset, we can propagate that out to Fastly, and the new version will automatically show up in all the places where it’s referenced,” says Brett.

“The ability to quickly solve problems with AI has a substantial impact on our revenue, and that’s more apparent every quarter. Few of our competitors are doing product- or brand-specific modeling because it takes a lot of time and resources. We overcame those hurdles with Google Cloud.”

—Jim Hanifen, Head of Product, Brandfolder

Improving employee and customer productivity

Brandfolder also uses Google solutions for real-time collaboration and productivity, using G Suite to connect employees with intuitive, cloud-based apps. Teams use Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Sheets, Slides, and Hangouts Meet every day to move the business forward. Many of Brandfolder’s customers are also G Suite users, and Brandfolder offers a plug-in that allows them to view their creative assets inside of Docs and pull images in as needed. Customers can also log into Brandfolder with their G Suite credentials, making the solution even easier to use.

“We’ve been using G Suite since the beginning, and it’s helped us collaborate efficiently to build a successful, growing company,” says Jim. “Our teams expect to have that kind of close collaboration, and everyone here enjoys the G Suite experience.”

Driving 99 percent annual business growth

With automated tagging and other innovative AI-based features, Brandfolder is helping customers locate and distribute assets faster. As a result, Brandfolder is building customer loyalty and increasing sales, growing its business by 99 percent year-over-year. Since moving to GCP, Brandfolder has been able to scale its analytics and data pipeline 50x without a corresponding increase in costs and has not had to expand its development team.

“The ability to quickly solve problems with AI has a substantial impact on our revenue, and that’s more apparent every quarter,” says Jim. “Few of our competitors are doing product- or brand-specific modeling because it takes a lot of time and resources. We overcame those hurdles with Google Cloud.”

Open beta now available to all Google Workspace customers

Seeing is believing. For many service technicians, trainers, and other frontline workers, the ability to share a real-time view of what they can see with their virtual clients or teams can make all the difference. That’s what we’ve heard from global participants in the closed beta of Google Meet running on Glass Enterprise Edition 2 that we announced last year. 

Starting today, we’re making Google Meet on Glass Enterprise Edition 2 (Meet on Glass) more broadly available through an open beta. Any Google Workspace customer around the world can now give their employees, suppliers, and partners greater sight with Glass—using the simple and intuitive Google Meet environment they’re already used to. With Meet on Glass, meeting participants can experience a first-person view of the Glass wearer’s perspective and collaborate with the entire video meeting in real time. 

Making it easier to solve hard problems

Customers who’ve been testing Meet on Glass are linking their teams across geographies to collaborate in new ways and solve problems together. In the US, real estate services group CBRE has implemented Meet on Glass to allow employees at job sites to connect with HQ teams and project managers. Connecting the whole team with live video from the frontline is allowing faster decision making and clearer communications between team members. 

To be successful, remote assistance via video call must be simple and seamless. CBRE and other early customers have shared that they don’t want their workers to have to become technical experts to use video collaboration in this way. Ease of use—both for Google Meet and for Glass—and speed to join a video meeting are top priorities for them. And with Google Workspace integration, their teams can now join Calendar events directly from Glass with just a few taps. No complex signing in or scanning codes are required; users simply choose from their calendar on Glass to instantly join the meeting.

Getting Google Meet on Glass Enterprise Edition 2 

The Meet team is working with the community of Google Workspace partners to enable Google Meet on Glass Enterprise Edition 2 for customers in North America, Europe, and Australia. Customers in Japan can now also get Glass through a first-of-its-kind partnership with NTT DOCOMO, which can provide Meet on Glass directly to its customers in Japan. After extensive testing, NTT DOCOMO chose Google Meet on Glass as the preferred solution for their business customers who want frontline collaboration solutions for their enterprises.

Meet on Glass is one of the ways we’re bringing powerful new video conferencing experiences to customers around the world, regardless of the devices they’re using to connect and collaborate with their teams. When combined with our Google meet hardware and peripherals, the possibilities for real-time connection and problem solving are even greater. And it’s part of our ongoing commitment to creating innovative and immersive meeting experiences that help people feel like they’re working together, not just meeting together.

Sign up now to participate in the Google Meet on Glass Enterprise Edition 2 open beta.