Tag Archives: alphabet-inc

In 2019, you may check your email with the help of a balloon 12 miles up in the sky. Project Loon, from Google parent company Alphabet, uses high-altitude solar-powered balloons instead of the usual land-based cell towers to provide your phone’s wireless connection to the network. It began as a somewhat bizarre project from the …

It’s been more than two years since Nest entered a new product category, but the smart home company is now coming off the sidelines. On Wednesday, Nest, which is owned by Google‘s parent Alphabet, showed off two new devices during a press event in San Francisco. The first is an internet-connected doorbell called Nest Hello, which has a camera, speaker …

Google has reached an agreement with HTC, but it isn’t the much-rumored deal to buy the handset maker. Instead, the tech giant is paying the struggling Taiwanese phone maker $1.1 billion in cash to hire certain HTC employees, many of whom are already working with Google on the Pixel line of phones. Google will also license HTC intellectual property. The …

Now playing: Watch this: ARCore is Google’s augmented-reality platform for Android 1:17 Google wants to get augmented reality on more phones with ARCore.  Google If Google knows one thing, it’s how to get a lot of people to use its technology. The search giant has seven products with more than a billion users, including Google Maps, Gmail and its iconic …

Do you use YouTube’s own web-based video editor to cut together your YouTube videos?  Statistically, you probably don’t. Google has noticed that less than 0.1 percent of all YouTube creators are using that particular feature, and so it — and YouTube’s Photo Slideshows feature, which I can’t say I’ve ever heard of — are officially going away on September 20.  …

Amazon Web Services, the e-commerce giant’s other mega business that powers websites for companies like Netflix and Comcast, has been working on a translation service that clients could use to make sites and apps available in multiple languages, CNBC reported Monday.  Amazon is already using a technology internally to translate items like product information, but the company is now preparing to …

Uber and Lyft may have a hold on the carpool market, but Waze is aiming to gain an edge. The mapping and navigation app, which is owned by Google parent company Alphabet, said Wednesday it’s expanding its carpool service throughout all of California on June 6. Before now, the service was only in the San Francisco Bay Area and Israel. …

Snapchat made a big mark on augmented reality by putting digital flower crowns on real people. Now Google may make its own mark by showing you digital information about real flowers. On Wednesday, the search giant announced a big push into augmented reality, which overlays digital images on what you’d normally see through a camera. The new technology, announced at …

YouTube is trying to make its virtual reality app more social. Google’s video site announced Thursday at its I/O developer conference that people will be able to watch VR videos together while in its VR app. While you’re in there, you and a small group of friends can sync up videos to watch together simultaneously and talk to each other …

Two years ago, a Google senior vice president named Sundar Pichai flew back to his birth country of India to launch a major new initiative aimed at connecting “the next 5 billion.” He was referring to the vast number of people who did not yet have a smartphone. The effort was called Android One, and the goal was to teach …