It’s incredible to see how startups across industries are using cloud technology to help address some of our most pressing, important, and life-altering challenges. Startups and high-growth technology companies are choosing Google Cloud and using technologies like Google Compute Engine (GCE), BigQuery, Looker, Firebase and more to help businesses reduce energy consumption, build more inclusive and sustainable workforces, and in the case of high-growth biotech company Freenome, are creating diagnostic tests that will help detect life-threatening diseases like cancer in the earliest, most-treatable stages.

Freenome is driven by its mission to develop high-quality diagnostic tests to detect and treat diseases like cancer from a simple blood draw. In 2022, Freenome significantly accelerated its growth on Google Cloud to support the business as it began the clinical trials of its diagnostic blood testing technology. Today, the high-growth biotech is further deepening its partnership with Google Cloud in order to support its rapid growth and scale as it concludes clinical validation, takes its tests through FDA approvals, and prepares to bring its product to market.

When detected early, data shows that there is a higher probability for cancer to be beaten, yet not everyone has access to early detection measures. By creating a way to detect the earliest warning signs of cancer with a standard blood test, Freenome is helping bridge the gap between accessibility and early cancer detection. To do this, Freenome built a multiomics platform capable of analyzing and detecting disease-associated patterns in the blood using molecular biology, advanced biology, and machine learning. By applying machine learning models trained to scan for tumor and non-tumor biomarkers to the diagnostic process, Freenome’s tests can identify suspicious molecular patterns in a patient’s blood, which will ultimately help more people detect cancer at its earliest stages in the body.

The amount of molecular data extracted from blood samples can quickly add up to hundreds of terabytes worth of data, so it was clear early on that Freenome would need infrastructure that could support the fast sequencing and processing of large amounts of data. In addition, Freenome’s collaboration technology needed to provide flexibility, security, and proper identity management safeguards, given the nature of its business. To meet these needs and support the company’s plans for growth and innovation, Freenome selected Google Cloud as its primary cloud provider, utilizing services like Google Cloud Storage and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), along with Google Workspace as its collaboration platform.

Using Cloud Storage alongside GKE gives Freenome the computing power needed to sequence and process mass amounts of blood sample data with high-performance, speed, and at scale. Cloud Storage also makes it easy for Freenome to leverage other Google Cloud capabilities like BigQuery for analytics with built-in query acceleration. Additionally, the built-in cluster management capabilities of GKE make it easy for Freenome’s engineering and IT teams to manage and deploy new workflows to the high-performance computing clusters used by the machine learning components of its multiomics platform to speed up cancer detection. Freenome also uses Google Cloud technologies like Artifact Registry and Cloud SQL, which help the company ensure a managed and secure software supply chain of containers and other artifacts.

Today, as a part of its expanded partnership with Google Cloud, Freenome is significantly increasing its use of Cloud Storage and GKE as it works to complete the clinical trials related to its diagnostic test. By expanding its use of GKE and Cloud Storage, Freenome will be equipped to perform the compute-intensive analytical work required for running its research workflow and diagnostic classifier algorithms. In addition, Freenome teams will continue leveraging Google Workspace products across the company so they can securely manage and collaborate on business-critical content.

Besides using Cloud Storage, GKE, and Google Workspace to support the company’s rapid growth, Freenome plans to leverage Google Cloud technologies like BigQuery to support the research and development of new products. The company is also testing security technologies like BeyondCorp to keep its growing workforce secure and productive at scale.

As the future of disease detection continues to evolve, Google Cloud is proud to support the growth of innovative companies like Freenome with infrastructure and cloud technologies so they can help empower more people with early disease detection solutions and ultimately, change more lives for the better.

With the novel coronavirus COVID-19 sweeping across continents and fatalities climbing every day, it was only a matter of time before countries closed their borders to contain its spread.

In the wake of this decision, travel and tourism, the linchpins of many economies, were among the worst affected.

According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), the COVID-19 pandemic caused a 22 percent fall in international tourist arrivals during the first quarter of 2020, and could see an annual decline of between 60 percent and 80 percent when compared with 2019.

The impact on the economy and to livelihoods that are dependent on tourism and hospitality has been significant. Prior to the pandemic, the outlook was quite different. Research by UNWTO in 2018 estimated that India would have 50 million outbound tourists by 2020.

Technology was also set to play a huge part in that growth. A Google Travel study showed that 74 percent of travellers were planning their trips on the Internet, and technologies like AI, IoT and VR were all set to be key trends this year.

Now, as borders slowly reopen and travel restrictions are gradually lifted, technology could once again be the game-changer. Manoj Sharma CTO, Cleartrip.com spoke to YourStory about the industry’s road to recovery and how technology will aid that journey.

Read the Full Story on YourStory

Budget concerns and inflation shock are causing noticeable shifts in consumer behavior, a head-spinning turnabout since the pandemic days of 2020. We went from not having access to enough goods to now not having the right goods at the right price points. Heading into the holiday season, retailers will need to look sharp and be able to deliver value to the increasingly cost-conscious consumer — with frictionless product discovery and digital shopping experiences, relevant inventory, and personalization.

Those are a few of the insights gleaned from a recent eMarketer webcast on how retailers can better combat the effects of inflation, with pragmatic recommendations from experts including Amy Eschliman, managing director of retail solutions strategy and industry engagement at Google Cloud; Alexis Hoopes, vice president and head of e-commerce and direct-to-consumer (DTC) at Mattel Inc; and Elissa Quinby, head of retail insights at Quantum Metric. We’d like to share five key takeaways that retailers can adopt.

1. Be prepared for earlier holiday planning. Budget-conscious buyers are planning their purchases earlier than ever. According to our partner Quantum Metric’s latest Retail Benchmarks research, 40% of U.S. consumers and 30% in the UK have already started their holiday shopping1. At Mattel, Alexis noted, “We’ve learned to be nimble and early for our consumers, and to have products available for them when they’re ready to shop.” With higher prices, she added, “Consumers are preplanning and researching more, viewing product detail pages multiple times to check a higher-price item before adding it to their basket.”

Quantum Metric’s same research also shows that while average cart values grew between January to July 2022 — larger than they were at the same time last year1 — consumers were shopping less frequently. Because of higher prices, 37% of shoppers are now pre-planning and purchasing items all at once to help keep to their budget1. Amy observed. “That means retailers need to make it super easy for customers to find what they want to avoid shopping-cart abandonment.”

Retailers who make it easier for shoppers to find the right products, by providing Google-quality search and recommendations, can help reduce cart abandonment and increase conversions.

2. Get a handle on out-of-stock issues. While many of the supply-chain issues that surfaced during the pandemic have cleared up, inventory continues to be a challenge in retail. During the 2021 holiday season, Google/Ipsos research shows that consumers saw a 253% increase in “out of stock” messages versus pre-pandemic2. Elissa further pointed out that a great majority of both U.S. and UK consumers experience out-of-stock issues several times a month. It’s a fluid situation, however, with retailers facing bloated inventory as consumer demands quickly pivot from, for example, branded goods to generic or white-label items. “In the next six months or so, you really need to make sure you have the right inventory to meet consumer demands,” she advised.

The need for end-to-end visibility and the ability to act in real-time across the supply chain has never been more pressing. Google Cloud and our partners are tackling the top supply chain issues head on with solutions that enable end-to-end visibility, analytics and alert-driven event management as well as AI solutions and automation to streamline processes like procurement, fulfillment, and delivery.

3. Introduce value: communicate the quality of the product and the experience. While rising prices are paramount for many shoppers, it’s a common misconception that consumers are making purchase decisions based solely on price. Alexis remarked, “In e-commerce, we talk about price, product, service, and experience. Price is only one of the pillars for consumers. At Mattel, we are fully focused on product and experience. What makes this special? How do we connect directly in new ways to the consumer? Create ‘wow’ moments and deeper connections. When we think about value for our consumers, it’s the strength of the products that will drive the purchase.”

Elissa also noted that while consumers are doing a lot of comparison shopping, it’s really about value, whether a high-quality product or a high-quality experience. Quantum Metric’s Continuous Product Design solution, which is built with BigQuery, ingests data across multiple digital touchpoints, including from mobile and web applications, and connects customer signals to every stage of the product lifecycle to help deliver the products and experiences that customers actually want.

4. Ensure consistent experiences across channels. Today, consumers crave the cross-channel shopping experience. “The channel experience has gone from online to in-store to now everywhere,” Amy commented. “We call it ubiquitous digital shopping.” Elissa added that 75% of consumers do most of their shopping digitally. However, mobile drives 67% of digital traffic, but just 49% of sales.1 “Recent trends in traffic and conversion rates by device show that we can expect the most traffic for the big sale days on mobile,” she said. “People are looking for discovery and awareness, maybe even adding items to the cart as a placeholder or reminder. But they prefer to complete a sale on a desktop. It will be critical for retailers to offer a consistent experience, especially on major sale days like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.” Elissa also advised wrapping up any experiments with product and site design early, making sure to understand the customer experience holistically across the organization and prioritizing efforts to eliminate friction.

Consumers now expect to be able to shop wherever and whenever best fits their needs, whether in a store, on your website, through your app, or from within a social media ad, and have it be a consistently good experience no matter how they first entered or exited your commerce site. Google’s 2022 Retail Marketing Guide provides useful insights and tips on how to grow your online and in-app sales.

5. Personalize touchpoints to build loyalty. Connecting with your customer base and making sure they understand the value of your offering is essential. Alexis noted that the key is to keep your messages fresh as the holiday shopping season expands, providing new messages as they keep coming back to your store. “We need to engage them by helping them find what they are looking for at the right time,” she said. “Recognize that they are doing more planning and wish-list building early, then buying last-minute gifts at lower prices towards the end. Make sure those are front and center.”

Alexis also pointed out that today, consumers are providing more data points with the products they view or the items sitting in their carts. “What’s so great about e-commerce is that we can use all of this to create more personalized, direct messages targeted to those consumers,” she commented.

Amy recommended continuing to focus on conversion with product discovery and personalization, harnessing customer data to drive insights and action. “Any company’s biggest asset is their data. Using it in as many ways possible and activating it across the company is incredibly important,” she remarked. “Take advantage of your first-party data to activate everything from marketing campaigns to a more efficient supply chain. For every customer who comes to one of your digital properties, make sure your product discovery is as easy as possible. Pay attention to your recommendations, driving personalization to make that experience as unique and fruitful for the customer as possible.”

Achieving these objectives requires a modern cloud data warehouse and activation of a customer data platform. Retailers can explore how Google Cloud’s advanced data capabilities and our ecosystem of partners can power a customer data platform that supports more personalized marketing, shopping experience, and customer service.

While these are our key takeaways, we invite you to register to watch the on-demand webinar, “5 Ways Retailers Can Combat the Effects of Inflation,” for even more insights.

1. Quantum Metric Retail Benchmarks, “Adjusting for Inflation.” The report is based on aggregated browsing behavior from January to July 2022, paired with a survey of 3,400 consumers in the U.S. and UK.
2. Google/Ipsos, Holiday Shopping Study, Oct 2021 – Jan 2022, Online survey, US, n=7,253, Americans 18+ who conducted holiday shopping activities in past two days

Indonesia is leading the way for digital transformation in Southeast Asia. According to Google’s e-Conomy South East Asia report, the country’s 2030 Gross Merchandise Value – the value of online retailing to consumers –  could be twice the value of the whole of Southeast Asia today.  

This growth means that many companies need more qualified IT graduates and employees with digital skills than they have today. Fast-growing tech companies need more qualified IT graduates, and employees with digital skills. According to the World Bank, Indonesia needs an additional nine million people with digital skills by 2030. The shortage of technical talent reiterates the need to invest in a reliable skills pipeline.

Following years of digital talent developments in Indonesia, Google has become a supporter of Bangkit, an academy designed to produce high-caliber technical talent for Indonesian technology companies and startups. Bangkit has facilitated a multi-stakeholder collaboration between Google, government, industry, and universities across Indonesia. 

Last year, the President of Indonesia and the Ministry of Education and Culture, Research, and Technology, acknowledged Bangkit’s significant impact, with 3,000 students completing nearly 15,000 courses and specialisations. 

Building on last year’s success, Bangkit started its 2022 program in February, offering three learning paths to students:

• Cloud computing with Google Cloud, preparing students for the Google Associate Cloud Engineer certification. Some of the course components are also available online 
• Mobile development with Android, preparing students for the Google Associate Android Developer exam. An online version is available here. 
• Machine learning with Tensorflow, getting students ready to take the Tensorflow Developer certification. Some of the online courses are available here for others.

Bangkit 2022 has enrolled 3,100 university students who will take a five month study course, obtaining university study credit, as well as industry certifications. The program accepts diverse cohorts of people who are passionate about preparing for a tech career in the near future, with support and encouragement for women, people with disabilities, and students from across Indonesia to apply. 

Since its pilot in 2019, Bangkit has been guided by three principles:  

• Industry-led: provides curriculum and instructors from industry experts, including Google, GoTo and Traveloka. Instructors include key figures such as Laurence Moroney (Google, Lead AI Advocate), Google Developer Experts, and other committed professionals. 
• Immersive: combines online learning methods conducted in both individual and group settings.  
• Interdisciplinary: contains knowledge and best practices in tech, soft skills, and English to provide complete career readiness. 

The program runs from February to July 2022, and has a 900-hour curriculum throughout the 18-week learning experience. 

Benefits for students participating in Bangkit include:

• Study credit conversion 
• Job opportunities at our career fair
• Google Cloud, TensorFlow and AAD exam vouchers
• Incubation funds and mentorship support from industry

Towards the end of Bangkit 2022, students will team up for the Capstone Project challenge to propose solutions to some of the nation’s most pressing problems, such as environmentalism, accessibility, and more. The top 15 teams will be selected to receive funding to incubate their capstone projects. These education and career-preparedness offerings are provided at no cost.

Google is partnering with industry, governments, universities, and employers to help meet the skill demands of today. From supporting the State of Ohio to offer tech skills to residents, to working with the University of Minnesota-Rochester to create a customized health sciences degree program, Google is here to help our partners prepare those they serve for a cloud-first world.

In our conversations with technology leaders about data-driven transformation using Google Data Cloud –  industry’s leading unified data and AI solution – , one important topic is incorporating continuous intelligence to move from answering questions such as “What has happened? to questions like “What is happening?” and “What might happen?”. The core to this evolution is the need for an underlying data processing that not only provides powerful real-time capabilities for events happening close to origination, but also brings together existing data sources under one unified data platform to enable organizations to draw insights and take actions holistically. Dataflow, Google’s cloud-native data processing and streaming analytics platform, is a key component of any modern data and AI architecture and data transformation journey, along with BigQuery, Google’s internet-scale warehouse with built-in streaming, BI engine and ML; Pub/Sub, a global no-ops event delivery service; and Looker, a modern BI and embedded analytics platform. One of the key evaluation factors is potential economic value of Dataflow to their organization, particularly in the context of engaging other stakeholders is key for many of the leaders that we engage with. So we commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a comprehensive study on the impact that Dataflow had on their organization by interviewing actual customers . 

Today we’re excited to share our commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, the Total Economic Impact™ of Google Cloud Dataflow, which allows data leaders to understand and quantify the benefits of Dataflow, and use cases it enables. Forrester conducted interviews with Dataflow customers to evaluate the benefits, costs, and risks of investing in Dataflow across an organization. Based on their interviews, Forrester identified major financial benefits across four different areas: business growth, infrastructure cost savings, data engineer productivity, and administration efficiency. In fact, Forrester found that customers adopting Dataflow can achieve a 55% boost in developer productivity and a 50% reduction in infrastructure costs. In fact, Forrester projects that customers adopting Dataflow can achieve a range of up to 171% Return on Investment (ROI) and a less than six months payback period. Customers can now use figures in the report to compute their own Return on Investment (ROI) and payback period.

“Dataflow is integral to accelerating time-to-market, decreasing time-to-production, reducing time to figure out how to use data for use cases, focusing time on value-add tasks, streamlining ingestion, and reducing total cost of ownership.” – Lead technical architect, CPG

Let’s take a deeper look at the ways that Forrester found that Dataflow can help you achieve your goals and unlock your business potential. 

Benefit #1: Increase data engineer productivity by 55%

Developers can choose among a variety of programming languages to define and execute data workflows. Dataflow also seamlessly integrates with other Google Cloud Platform and open source technologies to maximize value and applicability to a wide variety of use cases. Dataflow streamlined workflows with code reusability,dynamic templates, and the simplicity of a managed service. Engineers trusted pipelines to run correctly and adhere to governance. Data engineers avoided laborious issue-monitoring and remediation tasks that were common in the legacy environments such as poor performance, lack of availability, and failed jobs. Teams valued the language flexibility and open source base.

“Dataflow provided us with ETL replacement that opened limitless potential use cases and enabled us to do smarter data enhancement while data remains in motion.” — Director of data projects, financial services

Benefit #2: Reduce infrastructure costs by up-to 50% for batch and streaming workloads 

Dataflow’s serverless autoscaling and discrete control of job needs, scheduling, and regions eliminated overhead and optimized technology spending. Consolidating global data processing solutions to Dataflow further eliminated excess costs while ensuring performance, resilience, and governance across environments. Dataflow’s unified streaming and batch data platform gives organizations the flexibility to define either workload in the same programming model, run it on the same infrastructure, and manage it from a single operational management tool. 

“Our costs with our cloud data platform using Dataflow are just a fraction of the costs we faced before. Now we only pay for cloud infrastructure consumption because the open source base helps us avoid licensing costs. We spend about $120,000 per year with Dataflow, but we’d be spending millions with our old technologies.” – Lead technical architect, CPG

Benefit #3: Increase top-line revenue by improving customer experience and retention with payback time of < 6 months

Streaming analytics is an essential capability in today’s digital world to gain real-time actionable insights. Likewise, organizations must also have flexible, high- performance batch environments to analyze historical data for building machine learning models, business intelligence, and advanced analytics. Dataflow enabled real-time streaming use cases, improved data enrichment, encouraged data exploration,improved performance and resiliency, reduced errors, increased trust, and eliminated barriers to scale. As a result, organizations provided customers with more accurate, relevant, and in-the-moment data-backed services and insights — boosting customer experience, creating new revenue streams, and improving acquisition, retention, and enrichment.

“It’s already been proven that we are getting more business [with Dataflow] because we can turn around results faster for customers.” – VP of technology, financial services technology

“When we provide data to our customers and partners with Dataflow, we are much more confident in those numbers and can provide accurate data within a minute. Our customers and partners have taken note and commented on this. It’s reduced complaints and prevented churn.” – Senior software engineer, media

Other benefits 

Eliminated administrative overhead and toil

As a cloud-native managed service, all administration tasks such as provisioning, scaling, and updates are automatically handled by Google Cloud. Teams no longer need to manage servers and related software for legacy data processing solutions. Admins also streamlined processes for setting up data sources, adding pipelines, and enforcing governance.

Saved business operations costs for support teams and data end users

Dataflow improved the speed, quality, reliability, and ease of access to data for insights for general business users, saving time and empowering users to drive better data-backed outcomes. It also reduced support inquiry volume while automating manual job creation.

What’s next?

Download the Forrester Total Economic Impact study today to dive deep into the economic impact Dataflow can deliver your organization. We would love to partner with you to explore the potential Dataflow can unlock in your teams. Please reach out to our sales team to start a conversation about your data transformation with Google Cloud.