(Not so) Up in the air - The Cloud

We were invited to this year's Google Leaders Circle, which took place as part of the Google Cloud Summit held in Munich on 6 December. Here's a little write-up of our impressions including a sneak-peek into some exciting new ideas to further innovate on the SecureBeam-front.

println("Hello Wor.., err, Munich!")

It's always exciting to visit new places, make new friendships and, on a side note, sometimes just so get in touch with Google's leading members of the central european space. On December 6 we had the opportunity to be part of Google's Cloud Summit for 2017, held in Munich, to learn about the latest and greatest new products. Specifically, team expressFlow joined the "Leaders Circle" part of this one-day-convention with a set of topics emphasizing the state of tech regarding cloud-products aimed at successfully running a company in this sector.

Planet Google says "Hi!"

Be sure to take your reality-kit with you, because planet Google's atmosphere has a very intriguing way of reality distortion in the most positive way possible. Nicely colored beanbags all over the place, in between some tabletop soccers and chill music in the background together make a very welcoming first impression for the excited visitor.

To further build up momentum, the summit quickly kicks off with its main keynote giving an update to the latest cloud inventions available. This year's focus clearly was on machine learning, with your favourite search-giant demonstrating the use of ML in practically every single of its products. There's a powerful palette of cloud-features developed by Google that can be used right now which take advantage of the fast-paced inventions in ML lately. Some of these features can also enrich our user's (and I hope you are, too!) experience with SecureBeam:

• Vision-API Here's an idea: What if you could search for any arbitrary term in SecureBeam to quickly find the stuff you have beamed up securely, without ever tagging anything? Google Vision to the rescue! This mighty API uses Google's ML-infrastructure to automatically tag your photos (and even videos!) to related topics. To get a taste of its power, just try Google Photos!
  SecureBeam could take great advantage of this feature to leverage our very own search to new levels. Furthermore, the set of tags related to a file could also be split the SecureBeam-way to all your cloud-providers, thus consequently protecting your privacy.
  
• DLP-API DLP, or "Data Loss Prevention", anonymizes photo input by black-marking data-sensitive fields in the picture, e.g. the upper part of a face, social-security-numbers, etc. This way, even the most sensitive information you provide gets protected before the associated file can get split and uploaded. Nice!
  

The show must go on

The next couple of hours provided more information on specific topics by giving the stage to additional Googlers. During the breaks in between, we had the opportunity to talk to colleagues in our business and exchange new ideas and thoughts. To wrap things up, it was a great time and I hope you're as excited about the future in the cloud as we are!