There were several reasons why Suddora and CustomOnIt shouldn’t have been successes. My friend Adam and I were working in a Michigan video store and knew next to nothing about running a business. We started with an idea to sell sweatbands, like the ones I used to wear in my band, and over several months managed to launch it legitimately. This led us to bail on the video store and move to Vegas—smack in the middle of the 2008 financial crisis. We lived on ramen noodles and little else for two years while we got the company going. Our friends took bets on how long we’d stay in business. 

But 11 years later, we have not one but several successful sports apparel businesses, I’m running a bunch of other e-commerce companies (including SweatBands.com), and we’re selling in the United Kingdom and soon in Asia Pacific. 

How did two broke-but-determined guys working in a video store get this far? We always believed in moving ahead, no matter what obstacles came our way—and we learned a lot about how technology like G Suite can make a small business look and operate like a bigger one, and how searching Google for business resources can pay off.

Starting with an idea, a domain and…ramen noodles
In my band days in Michigan, we tried to think of ways to get our name out there. Instead of the usual T-shirts or stickers, I pitched the idea of custom sweatbands since I wore sweatbands when I played guitar. I figured other people might like sweatbands with the names of their bands.

We knew we needed a web domain and email addresses so we could sell online. We found out about G Suite during a Google search, and it seemed like the most pain-free way to get started by buying the domains Customonit.com and Suddora.com (Adam made up that name. “Sudor” is Spanish for “sweat,” which is what the businesses were about, and we added the “d” and the “a” to make the name stand out.).

Even though the company was just me and Adam, we needed to look professional (and also a bit bigger than we actually were). With G Suite, we set up email aliases for various business functions, like help@suddora.com and sales@suddora.com, and arranged to route email from these addresses into our regular Gmail inboxes; that way, customers could easily reach us.

Scaling our business in the Las Vegas heat
Next, we decided to move to Las Vegas because, in the aftermath of the recession, we could live cheaply there. When we got our first big sweatband order from a major NCAA football team,  the momentum started. Now we had to scale up the business so we could handle more orders and deal with suppliers, even though we were still working out of our living room.

We grew to a five-person team, including a customer service person and a designer, and G Suite made it easy to onboard everyone quickly. In addition to giving new employees their own email addresses with the Suddora.com or STbands.com domain names, we routed emails to various people from the “help” and “sales” email aliases we had set up. We also made sure that all of our employees were set up on G Suite, too.

Once orders started to roll in from major fast-food restaurants, football teams, and sports apparel companies, our roles constantly changed. G Suite helped us shave off precious time by helping us manage email less manually—we automatically re-routed emails depending on who’s working on what. If I wanted to take on more sales work, I forwarded emails from sales@suddora.com to my inbox with one click. Same thing with customer service: We never want to lose track of customer service inquiries, which are a high priority.

In 2009, a year after starting the business, Adam and I left our part-time jobs at a local department store to run the business full-time. We promised ourselves that when we hit a revenue target of $15,000 in one month we’d buy a TV for the apartment—and we got that TV!

Going international (without leaving our office)
The business was taking off. We decided to split STbands.com into two websites: Suddora.com for sports sweatbands and CustomOnIt.com for custom apparel and party goods. We recognized that half our customers wanted athletic wear and accessories, while the other half wanted custom items like T-shirts and wristbands. It was a move that would allow each business to thrive.

Creating products and managing suppliers was getting more complicated. Once again, G Suite helped us move our business forward. We used Google search to find suppliers in China, and were able to set up supplier relationships and talk one-on-one with the people making our products—without extensive and time-consuming travel to China. You can accomplish so much with video meetings and chat.

With more suppliers and more customers, we needed to constantly up our game in terms of product design. When we create new designs it generates a ton of files and iterations, which get shared back and forth between pattern designers, photo editors, writers, and marketing professionals. To help centralize these files, we store everything in Google Drive so they can be shared and accessed anytime, from anywhere. For example, we use Sheets to house updated data on our products across all of our e-commerce platforms. 

Lessons learned
Eleven years on, I’m still learning every day about what it takes to run and grow a business. I think what helps is finding tools like G Suite that are so easy to use, you don’t need much ramp-up time to get started—nor do your employees. That means we’re all productive much faster. 

Also, you might be thinking about a million ideas for starting a business. But the truth is, you only need one—an opportunity that makes you think, “Okay, this is going to be big.” So go for it. You can’t afford not to.

Last year we launched our on-demand rides and delivery solution to help businesses improve operations as well as transform the driver and customer journey from booking to arrival or delivery. When it comes to on-demand rides and deliveries, every minute matters. When users book a ride or order food, they want a seamless experience and real-time accurate updates. Today, we’re taking a closer look into data quality improvements for location, time and distance accuracy, and motorbike routes. 

Machine learning helps drive location accuracy

Location accuracy stands at the base of our customers’ operation. The location signals that are coming from mobile devices can sometimes be off for various reasons and  a driver’s location can get stuck, or jump around. 

Recently we developed mechanisms in our fleet management product that can take in multiple location signals and determine the most reliable location to use for a given vehicle. With that, we noticed drastic improvements: 

• Eliminated long periods of location ‘stuckness’ almost completely; a vehicle is considered ‘stuck’ when we think it’s moving but the measured location is not
• Reduced the jumpiness of the location signal by 52%-86%: ‘jumpiness’ is when a vehicle shows a sudden and usually drastic change in location. A jump is determined to exist when the speed the vehicle had to go at in order to cover the distance it did is unrealistic 
• Reduced the average jump distance by 44%-86% : ‘jump distance’ is the distance between two consecutive location pings when we determined a ‘location jump’ has occurred. 

Dunzo, a local e-commerce platform in India, explains how integrating the order tracking capability within Google Maps Platform’s On Demand Rides and Delivery solution has helped reduce support calls by 90%. The out-of-the-box solution helped Dunzo’s motorbike delivery partners with updating location sync to reduce stuckness and jumpiness as well as deliver premium user experiences.

When the vehicle location is more reliable, the dispatch decision is of higher quality, meaning there is a higher chance you will be able to make the optimal decision. This can lead to less wait time for consumers, increased driver happiness and fewer cancellations. 

Improvements in ETA accuracy in motorbike routes

In many geographic areas, road space is limited and car ownership is prohibitively expensive so motorbike is a prominent transportation mode. Motorbike mapping requires unique routing, ETA models, and navigation capabilities. Improvements in motorbike routing and ETA estimation have enabled customers like Gojek to offer better overall services, even in geographies with poor wifi or missing roads.

Recently, we further improved ETA outcomes by developing new machine learning models trained specifically for motorbikes. These models help our systems account for differences in congestion and traffic flow that arise in different regions and scenarios.

Globally, we measured an ~8% improvement in ETA accuracy for riders in the general public, and a ~6% improvement in on-demand rides and deliveries ETA accuracy.  In this on-demand economy, where consumers are accustomed to real-time trip and order progress, these improvements will significantly improve their experience.

We will continue to innovate on both our car and motorbike on-demand rides and deliveries capabilities based on customer demand and requirements.  We are committed to the success of our customers by building a seamless experience for all parties—consumers, drivers, and fleet operators—in the rides and deliveries journey.
For more information on Google Maps Platform, visit our website.

Many organizations, including Google, have moved quickly to embrace working from home. With this widespread remote work, it’s never been more important for IT admins to be certain that every device in their organization is secure, even when that device isn’t company-owned. 

We pioneered zero-trust security through our BeyondCorp strategy and leverage it to offer advanced security for G Suite* users to protect secure access for all devices. Admins can enforce these controls across G Suite and other corporate applications and data, ensuring consistent security and user experience across your organization.

Today, we’re laying out six key controls that IT admins can use within G Suite to help keep their organizations safe when using the bring your own device approach (BYOD). You can also review our detailed security checklist here, and learn more from our course on Managing G Suite here. 

Secure mobile and desktop devices with endpoint management

BYOD devices can differ widely across an organization, with a range of OS versions, hardware modes, patch versions, and more, so it’s impossible to rely on a one-size-fits-all approach to device management. With Google endpoint management, IT admins can easily support a variety of mobile and desktop devices by enforcing measures like minimum software versions and blocking jailbroken or rooted devices, in many cases without requiring full device rights for employee privacy. 

When it comes to managing mobile devices, G Suite offers basic and advanced mobile device management:

• With basic mobile device management, BYOD devices are secured with baseline security features with no end user friction. Admins can enforce a passcode, get a device inventory, wipe Google accounts remotely, and even remotely install applications on Android devices. 
• With advanced mobile device management, admins can apply more policy controls over BYOD devices, and Android users can keep their personal data private and separate from their work data with Android Work Profiles. You can also allow and manage work apps on iOS and Android devices.

Admins can also manage and secure desktop devices with fundamental device management and enhanced desktop security for Windows. With fundamental device management, when a user logs into G Suite through any browser on a Windows, Mac, Chrome, or Linux device, that device will be automatically enrolled with endpoint management. This provides a base level of security to every desktop device that accesses G Suite data. With enhanced desktop security for Windows, admins can easily manage and secure Windows 10 devices through the admin console.

Enable secure connections without a corporate VPN using context-aware access

Context-aware access offers protection from unwanted access to G Suite services without the need for a VPN, and allows admins to set up different access levels based on a user’s identity and the context of the request, taking into account factors such as the country, device security status, and IP address of the request. For example, you can require BYOD devices accessing G Suite to meet encryption and password requirements, or restrict contractors from accessing G Suite from company managed Chromebooks.

Control data access with app access control

It’s important to protect all devices in your organization—corporate or BYOD—from malicious apps trying to gain access to corporate data. Using app access control, admins can take steps to prevent these apps from tricking users into mistakenly granting access to corporate data. With this feature, admins can choose which third-party apps are allowed to access users’ G Suite data by explicitly trusting, limiting, or blocking access for apps.

Enforce 2-Step Verification

With 2-Step Verification, admins can reduce the risk of unauthorized access by asking users for additional proof of identity when signing in. And you can now use the Advanced Protection Program—our strongest protection for users at risk of targeted attacks. With the Advanced Protection Program for the enterprise, we’ll enforce a specific set of policies for enrolled users including security key enforcement, blocking access to untrusted apps and enhanced scanning for email threats

If you choose not to use security keys for any reason, you have multiple other options to enforce 2-Step Verification on BYOD devices. For Android and iOS, you can use Google prompt, Google Authenticator, text message, or phone call options for a second verification step.

Prevent data loss and leakage with data loss prevention

We know that as an admin, one of your highest priorities is to keep internal information safe and secure. That’s why we developed data loss prevention (DLP) policies to help protect sensitive information in Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, and Gmail from loss, misuse, or being accessed by unauthorized users. With G Suite DLP, admins can choose which types of data are sensitive and exactly how to protect them. Our controls enable easy detection of a wide variety of common info types, and administrators can supplement this with custom content detectors to meet their organization’s needs. You can also classify files in Drive automatically using DLP rules (beta) to categorize your data by sensitivity levels. DLP works on all the devices in your organization, including BYOD ones, since the protection is at the data and application level. 

In addition to DLP, you can use DXP for iOS devices to restrict the copy/pasting of G Suite data to other accounts, personal or otherwise. DXP for iOS can also restrict users’ ability to drag and drop files from specific apps within their G Suite account. Similarly, you can use Google endpoint management to configure Android devices to prevent data sharing between personal and work profiles.

Make retention and eDiscovery possible on all your devices with Vault

To support your organization’s retention and eDiscovery needs, Vault enables corporate data that’s stored in G Suite and accessed by BYOD devices to be available for all your information governance needs. No matter the owner of the device, your organization’s data stored in Gmail, Drive, Chat, Groups, Voice, and Meet are accessible to Vault.

Using the zero-trust security model, the G Suite features above work together to keep your data protected and organization secure across all devices, whether they’re corporate-owned or BYOD.

(*Google Workspace was previously G Suite)

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.”

Business leaders and IT professionals come to Google Workspace to build secure, cloud-first collaboration solutions that transform how people work together. Here’s the latest from Google Workspace leaders and partners about the evolving future of work and collaboration, all in one place.

Empowering everyday innovation to build a more adaptive business

• Hear from Google Workspace VP of Engineering, Philip Brittan, about how organizations can rethink their approach to innovation.

How organizations can rethink their approach to time management coaching

• Laura Mae Martin, Google’s Productivity Expert, on helping employees get more from their time, without sacrificing their wellbeing.

Google Workspace and Google Cloud help build the future of work at Airbus

• See how Airbus lived up to its mantra of “Any device, anytime, anywhere,” with help from Google Workspace and Google Cloud. Read the article.

Shaping the future of work for frontline workers in Asia Pacific

• Read about the new urgency for businesses to take a fresh look at work and technology experiences on the frontlines in APAC.

Boosting collaboration and participation in the hybrid work world

• Strategies and best practices for organizations building people-first, sustainable hybrid work models.

The future of work requires a more human approach to security

• Security is no longer just about protecting information or restricting how that information is accessed—it’s about building safe, efficient, and effective ways to facilitate seamless collaboration and information-sharing. Read more.

Insights from our global hybrid work survey

• Google Workspace commissioned Economist Impact to conduct a global hybrid work survey. Here are the resulting insights about employee wellbeing, productivity, and the need for better technology.