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Hello!

This past Friday, January 9, 2026, just a few hours after sending our first newsletter of the year, we welcomed Mateo into the world, my first child and Ismael's first grandchild. We couldn't be happier, and we wanted to share this news with all of you!

We will do our best to maintain our regular newsletter publication schedule over the coming months. We hope to succeed in this effort.

Thank you, as always, for reading.

Warm regards, today on behalf of Mateo as well!  🙂

Clara

And welcome to a new edition of “On the Net Today”, the newsletter where every Friday we share a selection of useful and interesting resources to help you get the most out of the internet and make the best use of your browsing time.

Here are the topics we’ve prepared for today:

• 📷 Enjoy the Best Images of 2025 from National Geographic

• 📧 Google enhances Gmail with Gemini AI to make it a personal, proactive assistant

• 📊 The world’s leading innovation economies

• ⏭️ In brief

• 🤔 Express Quiz

• 💡Recommended by: Sònia Prats

📷 Enjoy the Best Images of 2025 from National Geographic

Whether you’re a photography enthusiast or simply enjoy breathtaking visuals, you’ll love National Geographic’s special feature on the best photos of 2025.

• Pictures of the year 2025 – National Geographic
  From thousands of images made by our photographers all around the world, we present the ones that moved and inspired us most.

At the end of the year, the magazine selects the most outstanding images published over the previous months, chosen from thousands of photographs captured by its photographers around the world.

In addition, National Geographic has produced two especially engaging digital features: one explains how some of the year’s best photographs were created, and the other features photographer Stephen Wilkes discussing how he captured his stunning wildlife image in Botswana.

• Here’s how the best photos of 2025 got made – National Geographic
  A behind-the-scenes look at the incredible steps photographers took to capture the year’s most exciting images.

• Stephen Wilkes takes us behind his lens – National Geographic
  The renowned photographer breaks down his extraordinary new wildlife image from Botswana.

Links:

• Pictures of the year 2025 – National Geographic

• Here’s how the best photos of 2025 got made – National Geographic

• Stephen Wilkes takes us behind his lens – National Geographic

📧 Google enhances Gmail with Gemini AI to make it a personal, proactive assistant

Gmail, the email service launched by Google in 2004, has now 3 billion users worldwide. In an effort to further improve its product, Google announced recently a series of significant updates linked to the integration of its Gemini artificial intelligence into Gmail.

The rollout of these new features and improvements will be gradual. It will begin with English-language Gmail users in the United States, as well as subscribers to Google AI Pro and Ultra. Over the coming months, these capabilities will be expanded to additional languages and regions worldwide.

Google’s goal is to turn Gmail into a personal and proactive assistant for users.

What new features have been announced? This is how the new features are explained on Google’s blog:

• Ask your inbox anything: AI Overviews

  Just like they do in Google Search, AI Overviews turn information into answers without the digging. When you open an email with dozens of replies, Gmail synthesizes the entire conversation into a concise summary of key points. (For everyone).

  And when you ask your inbox a question, we use Gemini to generate a simple AI Overview with the answer. (Available to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers).

• Get things done faster: Help Me Write, Suggested Replies and Proofread

  Starting today, everyone can use Help Me Write to polish emails or draft them from scratch. There are also new Suggested Replies (an update to Smart Replies) which use the context of your conversation to offer relevant, one-click responses that match how you write. (For everyone).

  You can also use the new Proofread feature for advanced grammar, tone and style checks so everything is polished before you send. (Available to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers).

• See what matters most: AI Inbox

  Your inbox is filled with updates; some are critical, others are just noise. The new AI Inbox filters out the clutter so you can focus on what’s most important.

  AI Inbox is like having a personalized briefing, highlighting to-dos and catching you up on what matters. It helps you prioritize, identifying your VIPs based on signals like people you email frequently, those in your contacts list and relationships it can infer from message content. 

Link:

• Gmail is entering the Gemini era – Google Blog

📊 The world’s leading innovation economies

Where are the world’s most important innovation hubs? The Innovation Cluster Ranking 2025, published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), identifies the local geographic areas with the highest concentration of innovative activity worldwide.

The ranking is based on a range of indicators, including the number of patents filed, the publication of scientific papers, and venture capital investment activity, among other factors. Together, these data points highlight the regions with the greatest density of inventors, startups, scientific authors, and investors.

The world’s top five innovation clusters are:

1. Shenzhen–Hong Kong–Guangzhou (China and Hong Kong)

2. Tokyo–Yokohama (Japan)

3. San Jose–San Francisco (United States)

4. Beijing (China)

5. Seoul (South Korea) 

The full ranking of the 100 innovation clusters analyzed—complete with an interactive map to explore each region in more detail—is available here:

• Innovation Cluster Ranking 2025

More information about the Global Innovation Index, first launched in 2007, can be found here: 

• Global Innovation Index – WIPO

⏭️ In brief

• The iconic French luxury fashion house Hermès has recently surprised audiences with a new website design built around hand-drawn illustrations of marine elements, created exclusively by artist Linda Merad. It’s a clear statement of intent that celebrates craftsmanship and human creativity in this new era of artificial intelligence. Even if only out of curiosity, the online store is well worth a visit.

  • Hermès’s hand-illustrated website is the ultimate luxury

     

    

• Apple introduces Apple Creator Studio, an inspiring collection of the most powerful creative apps

  Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Motion, Compressor, and MainStage — plus new AI features and premium content in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers — come together in a single subscription

• Digg launches its new Reddit rival to the public – TechCrunch

  Digg Public Beta Is Live - Digg

• What's your favorite color? Discover over 100,000 artworks by color – Google Arts & Culture.

🤔 Express Quiz

The concept of responsive web design was defined in 2010 by web designer and developer Ethan Marcotte, in an article published in A List Apart.

In the previous edition of “On the Net Today”, the quiz asked about the year when revenue from music streaming surpassed, for the first time, income generated by sales of physical formats—mainly CDs. The correct answer was 2017.

💡 Recommended by: Sònia Prats

• Recommended resource: Google NotebookLM

• Why?

  From the PDFs, web pages, videos, and text or audio files you provide, you receive high-quality summaries as well as clear connections across your different inputs. I particularly recommend the Audio Overview tool, which generates a podcast-style conversation between two people discussing your selected content in a natural and coherent way. This makes it well suited both for deepening your understanding of any topic and for language learning.

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That's all for today. See you in a week!