With April Fools’ Day falling on a weekend this year, the festivities are occurring slightly earlier. Like last year, we’ll be covering all the gag products and services from Google and Alphabet, as well as the best ones from the rest of the tech industry.
Formerly Google Ideas, Jigsaw is an Alphabet company aimed at using technology to “make people in the world safer.” Their latest project uses machine learning to identify toxic online comments and is intended to help foster harassment-free discussions.
Astro Teller, the head of Alphabet’s X unit, is today holding a press conference to discuss the ongoing progress of the Mountain View company’s Project Loon initiative. Among other things, Teller said that Loon is ditching the idea of having a “constant stream” of balloons floating around the globe…
Alphabet’s self-driving car unit hasn’t been a stranger to the inconvenience of constantly rotating staff, but now we’re hearing about one interesting piece of Waymo’s situation in particular that helps explain recent trouble retaining talent. According to a new report out of Bloomberg, early staffers were paid in an unusual way that later severely inflated compensation and led to exodus of early staff…
Last month a report surfaced suggesting that Alphabet was looking to sell off its satellite division, Terra Bella. Google purchased the company — formerly known as Skybox Imaging — back in 2014 for roughly $500 million. Now, in a statement on their website, Planet Labs has announced that it will be purchasing Terra Bella from Google…
The California Department of Motor Vehicles published its Autonomous Vehicle Disengagement Reports for 2016 today, which include statistics on disengagements for all of the companies currently testing self-driving cars in the Golden State. Importantly, Alphabet’s Waymo reported far fewer safety-related disengages and far more miles driven in 2016 compared to 2015, signaling that the company’s system is — as it should — continually getting safer…
Alphabet has just published Q4 2016 earnings of $26 billion, up 22% from the same quarter last year. Covering the final three months of the year, these numbers notably include the first holiday season featuring the Google-made Pixel and Home. While beating analyst expectations, the stock is down in after-hours trading.
Apple lured five-year VP of Technology at Nest and co-founder of Google X Yoky Matsuoka to work on its health initiatives in May of last year, but now she has seemingly jumped back over to the Mountain View, Company subsidiary. According to her LinkedIn profile, Matsuoka is now serving as Chief Technology Officer at Nest…
Up to today, Nest — a fellow subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet — has only made its products available in 7 countries. Now the company has announced that its products will soon be available in four new European countries: Austria, Germany, Italy and Spain…
In 2014, Google bought Titan Aerospace, maker of high altitude, solar-powered drone aircraft. At the time Google noted, “It’s still early days, but atmospheric satellites could help bring internet access to millions of people, and help solve other problems, including disaster relief and environmental damage like deforestation.” Titan previously said that its drones could collect real-time, high-resolution images of the earth, carry other atmospheric sensors and support voice and data services. A video of the Titan Aerospace Solara 50 can be seen below…
Following Google Fiber halting future deployment, another Alphabet project is being paused as part of continued financial tightening at the Mountain View company. Bloomberg reports that the Project Wing drone unit is slowing down, reducing employees, and canceling a previously unknown delivery partnership with Starbucks.
Reflecting Google’s burgeoning device business, parent company Alphabet now lists hardware inventory in its latest quarterly SEC filing (via Bloomberg). With the filing providing data through the end of September, it likely reflects the ramp up for hardware announced at the October 4th event.
Tomorrow will see Google host a keynote which could easily be ranked among the company’s history’s most important — at least according to SVP Hiroshi Lockheimer. But beyond marketing hype and anticipation, analysts too are tuning their financial forecasts for the event’s immediate resonance, and more importantly for the ripple effects beyond that…
Alphabet and the European Union have been in court for some time now over several alleged antitrust violations. These have been over claims that Google has favored its products in search results, forcing Android manufacturers to pre-install its applications, and even claims that the company makes it hard for advertisers to switch to other ad platforms. A new report claims that the EU looks to fine Google for incentivizing Android manufacturers to install Google Search on devices…
While Google is rumored to be prepping up to two new in-house made Android Wear smartwatches — which may or may not be featured in next week’s event — a spinoff of Alphabet‘s former Google X named Verily is still actively working on its health-tracking watch (via MIT Technology Review), which is slowly advancing towards being a finished product…
Google-related news may be all about Pixel, Nexus and Andromeda right now, but such a narrowed down field of topics would neglect the actual number of things the company — or, rather, the parent Alphabet — is actively working on; a big number. And one of its craziest, most interesting projects is Project Loon, which made extraordinary progress over the past few months…
Announced last week, Alphabet and Chipotle’s drone delivery program is already underway at Virginia Tech. The local Roanoke Times was able to snap several images of the ongoing tests, with the whole process sounding quite underwhelming.
Since the departure of founder Tony Fadell, new Nest CEO Marwan Fawaz has reiterated that the company was “not for sale” and released a new outdoor camera a few weeks later. Fortune, however, is now reporting that the company is again restructuring. The restructure will reportedly see the Nest platform team join Google proper.
According to a report this afternoon from The Wall Street Journal, Google is planning to launch a ride sharing service in San Francisco, California later this year to take on rivals Uber and Lyft. The new service is said to bring much cheaper rates in a market that is already intensely competitive. The move also has long-term implications for Google’s self-driving car project…
It feels like Google/Alphabet’s self-driving car project has been at a bit of a yellow light lately, with the recent departure of its technical lead & director Chris Urmson and other key members being the biggest sign of trouble. Now, Reuters reports that the Mountain View company has hired ex-Airbnb executive Shaun Stewart as “a director of the self-driving car project” (albeit not a replacement for Urmson), and that his role will be “to help commercialize Google’s self-driving technology.”
Fiat Chrysler and Google partnered up earlier this year to build some self-driving minivans, and without any clear direction for the partnership, many have wondered why Alphabet chose Chrysler — and why specifically they’re building a self-driving Pacifica. Now we know that at least part of the decision was because of the Pacifica’s electronic doors…
Google is seemingly testing a new feature in search: the ability to quickly find locations nearby with a search query. It doesn’t appear to be working for everyone, but apparently when some search for “**” (don’t forget to drop the quotation marks), users get a list business that are physically near to you…
