The European Commission held its first Consumer Summit this week, hosted by Commissioner Meglena Kuneva, bringing together 250 representatives of consumers, of business and of the regulators. Our President of International Operations Nikesh Arora, was one of the keynote speakers.

We urged the audience to consider how our children see the digital world touching every part of their lives. Kids ask their parents why they needs to sit in front of a television set at 19:00 for a specific show. They want to watch right now, and the Internet allows them.

Extrapolated to 1.4 million net subscribers, we explained how shopping, entertaining and learning habits are being revolutionized. At the Summit, Ofcom's Collette Bowe cited her agency's report showing that more than one in five adults in UK, France, Italy and the United States watched feature films or full-length TV shows' online. According to Forrester, 37% of West European adults regularly shopped online in 2008. Yet the Commissioner recently recorded that only 7% of EU consumers had shopped cross-border. That's something we'd like to work with the Commission and we have produced a new set of tips to encourage cross-border shopping.



These online consumers are powerful. When they unite to challenge business practises, they force change. Earlier this year, thousands of Facebook members protested a sudden change in the site’s terms of service and Facebook reverted back to their old terms.

Businesses need to recognise the force of the networked consumer. We built consumer control right into the heart of our recent interest based advertising announcements. In her speech at the Summit, Ofcom's Mrs. Bowe described the pre-requisites for privacy in a connected world - transparency, opt-out for consumers, and excluding from targeted advertising sensitive areas such as individual health without an explicit opt-in. Google subscribes to all these points.

We told the audience that regulation has a vital role to play in supporting tomorrow's consumer - enabling innovation while also protecting consumer rights. But just as this presents businesses with both great opportunities and great challenges, the same is true for regulators. Regulators have not only the challenge of deciphering the issues and weighing the alternatives, but also of doing them in "Internet time", fast enough to make a difference.

Posted by Simon Hampton, Director for European Public Policy and Government Affairs

This week, Gmail celebrated its 5th birthday with the international launch of Gmail Labs, a quirky experimental feature playground. To mark the occasion, we held a press conference in Brussels to talk about how Gmail has evolved from its beginnings as a straightforward email service to the robust and flexible communications product we offer users today. Here's a quick recap of the event for all of those who attended by about 40 journalists.

Our Director of Product Management Eric Tholome put Gmail in context by giving a short history of computing, noting how we moved from the mainframe to personal computers, and from being disconnected to becoming a part of a network via the Internet. Using the power of the Web, many applications today including email, calendars, and online photo albums now can be run from within a browser over the Internet, or "in the cloud." This transformation is analogous to the creation of the electric grid a century ago. Before, everyone owned their own electricity generator. Now that seems inefficient and unnecessary.

Working in the cloud also eliminates the annoyance of manually keeping software up-to-date. Instead of relying on each individual to upgrade his or her software, a web-based application receives new features, security patches, and general updates from the server-side. Users can stop worrying about running updates: they will always see the newest version. Gmail, a web-based service, is a good example. Hundreds of changes have been launched since 2004, and users simply saw the newest version every time they logged on. These new features include increased storage space, video chat, and updated interface, and more.



At the event, Product Manager Christian Miccio introduced the crowd to Gmail Labs, a set of experimental features that you can turn on to modify how your Gmail works. Initially launched in English in June, 2008, Gmail Labs has launched 43 features in 43 weeks - including features like Offline Gmail, Tasks, Mail Goggles, Undo Send, and the Forgotten Attachment Detector. Such a rapid launch schedule, Christian noted, could only happen for a cloud-based application. And now, with the launch of Gmail Labs in 47 new languages, users globally can play with these features in their local languages.

If you are unfamiliar with Gmail Labs experiments, which can be turned on and off individually with a few clicks of the mouse, take a look at the video below for a brief introduction.

To set up a Gmail account, just click and get started. To turn on Gmail Labs features, go to the Settings link in the top right, then navigate to the Labs tab within the window. f you haven't tried Gmail Labs yet, we encourage you to play around - there's a feature (or two!) for everyone.

Posted by William Echikson, Senior Manager, Communications and Kasia Chmielinski, Communications Associate