Alphabet

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.

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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…

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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…

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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…

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Acquired in 2014 and rebranded just last year, Alphabet is reportedly selling off its Terra Bella satellite company (via Bloomberg). Originally aimed at providing up-to-date imagery for disaster relief and later internet service, Alphabet continues to trim down its financially costly projects.

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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.

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While GV — formerly Google Ventures — is Alphabet’s more well-known venture capital arm, the parent company also runs a fund aimed at late-stage growth companies. Google Capital is now being renamed as CapitalG, with the new site revealing a previously unknown investment in the makers of Snapchat.

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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.

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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.”

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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…

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In this week’s top stories: Galaxy Note 7 launch details, Nexus (and Nexus Launcher) leaks, the best Android phones for August, and much more. 
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The long-time CTO and director of Alphabet’s self-driving car project is leaving the Mountain View company, according to a report this afternoon from Recode. Urmson has been on the project for seven years, and two other early — and crucial — members of the project, including Jiajun Zhu and Dave Ferguson are also leaving the project reports say…

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Google last year took the title of world’s favorite company from Apple, but this year has lost out heavily – potentially on a technicality.

Each year, FutureBrand looks at the world’s 100 largest companies and asks 3,000 consumers and industry professionals to score them on a range of factors, and to explain how they feel about their preferred companies. However, with Google’s reorganization, only parent company Alphabet is big enough to make it onto the top 100 shortlist – as CNET notes, Google itself doesn’t qualify.

As for Alphabet, that only managed 21st place, likely due to not having the same brand awareness as Google. There was also more difficulty in attributing specific qualities to such a diverse company – as evidenced by the feelings respondents had toward the company …

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