In addition, HP and Google launched the impressive new Chromebook 13, and a handful of notable Google and Android app updates arrived as well as news of a completely overhauled design for Instagram in testing.
Head below for all of the quick links to this weeks top stories, videos and more.
Every year, Larry Page and Sergey Brin write a Founders’ Letter to inform stockholders of recent developments and their vision for the future. For 2016, Page had recently-anointed Google CEO Sundar Pichai write the letter as a majority of ‘bets’ are under his purview. The letter focuses on six main areas.
In this week’s top stories, new Android phone leaks, Alphabet announces its Q1 2016 earnings, we go hands-on with the Oppo F1 Plus, LG G5 and much more. Head below for the quick links to all of this week’s top shared posts:
Funding data published by the Federal Elections Commission reveals that the largest donors to Bernie Sanders’ election campaign PACs were employees of tech companies. Employees of Google parent company Alphabet donated the most, at a little over a quarter of a million dollars.
Re/code today reports that Silicon Valley icon and longtime Google advisor Bill “The Coach” Campbell has passed away at age 75 after a long battle with cancer. The unfortunate news comes from “many prominent tech players,” following earlier unconfirmed reports. Campbell was a mentor to many tech leaders, including Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, and Jeff Bezos.
Earlier this month it was reported that Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs wanted to build a city from the ground up to test its ideas before rolling them out on a more wide scale basis. Now, The Information reports that Sidewalk is moving forward with this plan, codenamed “Project Sidewalk.”
There has been quite a bit of press surrounding the behind-the-scenes aspect of Alphabet companies over recent weeks, mainly centered around Nest and Tony Fadell. Earlier today, it was reported that Fadell appeared at Google’s all-hands meeting two-weeks ago to address the stream of negative press. In addition to Fadell defending Nest, Re/code now reports that executive Sergey Brin also defended the company’s life science unit, Verily, at the meeting.
Following a number of recent controversies surrounding smart-home accessory maker Nest, Recode reports that CEO Tony Fadell defended the company while addressing the reports at a recent Google meeting.
At the weekly Google meeting, Fadell reportedly addressed recent reports of troubles on the Nest team that followed comments from Dropcam’s former CEO Greg Duffy regarding Fadell’s brash management style. Those comments led to a public response from Fadell and a number of mainstream media outlets picking up the story, while a report last week from Recode added that the company was under-performing financially and that its future at Google could be in jeopardy.
Here’s an excerpt from Fadell’s talk with Googlers addressing the reports:
The major US record labels are still unhappy with the current state of their deals for YouTube royalties, leading the industry’s trade group to file a complaint as contracts with the streaming service are set to expire this year. Recode spoke with head of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) Cary Sherman who represents the labels and explained why the music industry thinks the deals and negotiations with YouTube are unfair and hurting the industry and artists.
Update: We’ve now been told that his LinkedIn profile is referring to YouTube Accelerator, although YouTube is not within the Access group at Google.
Back in November of last year, Re/code’s Mark Bergen profiled Google’s/Alphabet’s ‘Access and Energy’ group, which includes a lot of projects and products focused on helping bring people online. Of course Google Fiber falls into this category, but so does Project Link, a RailTel partnership, Project Sunroof, Project Titan, as well as the consumer OnHub router product. Now, the recently updated LinkedIn profile of Global Operations head Joe DeMike at the Alphabet group might have accidentally revealed the name of another product: Accelerator…
Nest has now said that it wants to ‘help’ owners of Revolv home hubs after it announced on Monday that it would be completely disabling the devices, turning them into a useless hunk of plastic.
Nest last night tweeted an invitation to owners to email them in order to find “the best solution” to the situation …
Alphabet is known for aiming for the moon with a lot of its efforts, and its Sidewalk Labs initiative appears to be no different. Sidewalk Labs has been around for about a year now and aims to improve WiFi availability and traffic in cities, but it looks like its plans don’t stop there. Sidewalk CEO Dan Doctoroff hinted that the company may be looking to build a city from scratch while speaking in New York at an event held by The Information.
Recent reports have painted a dire picture for Nest, with executives reportedly leaving, funding potentially on the verge of being cut, and much more. Now, a supposed Nest engineer has taken to Reddit to voice some frustrations. The engineer, who didn’t disclose his or her name, says that the company is “on deathwatch” thanks to “dire” sale and growth figures and no new innovation since the acquisition occurred.
Revolv, a home automation device company, has announced that it will be officially be shutting down next month. Alphabet’s Nest Labs purchased Revolv back in 2014 and the duo had worked toward bettering out the Works with Nest platform since then. After the acquisition, Revolv’s products continued to function as expected, but today’s shutdown announces that neither the hub or app will be functional any longer after May 15th.
Google/Alphabet published its self-driving car report for March over the weekend, and besides of course the latest numbers (including the number of cars in each city, the total number of autonomous and manual driven miles, etc.), there are also some new details on the system the company uses to map the cars’ surroundings, and mention of a mundane accident that happened in Austin, Texas involving one of the company’s Lexus vehicles…
Alphabet, obviously, has a lot of mainstream products that bring in a huge amount of revenue. Google’s ads business is clearly the front runner by a long shot, but there’s also Android, its hardware offerings (like the Nexus line, OnHub, etc.), Play Store digital content, as well as revenue from subsidiary companies like Nest (er.. Dropcam?), Google Fiber, and others.
But what usually excites people the most at Alphabet are the company’s moonshots under the umbrella of “X” — projects that usually cost hoards of money to keep alive and bring in nothing (or next to nothing) in return. The self-driving car project, Project Loon for worldwide internet, Project Titan drones, Makani‘s wind turbines, and Project Wing air-delivery are just a few, but there are even more exciting projects that have “graduated” to be their own unit at the company.
Google has often I/O as a showcase for its favorite moonshots. The company’s huge Google Glass extravaganza from 2012 is the most obvious example that comes to mind, but the company has used the stage at I/O to introduce to the world some just-as-exciting technologies with much less fanfare. Google ATAP, for example, gave a separate keynote at I/O 2015 introducing a handful of projects arguably more exciting than the things Google announced on the main stage. Technically not the same as the “moonshots” in the X division, but they’re in the same category in my opinion.
While you might be familiar with some the following projects (and that wouldn’t surprise me, considering they’ve all already been announced), they’re all ambitious experiments that have been recognized, announced, and made public-facing, but have since dropped off the radar; a lot of them have gone dormant, at least from our perspective. These are projects that excite me, and I want to hear what’s new with them come next month’s developer conference in Mountain View…
A new report (paywalled) from The Information today told us that Google is working on a competitor to the Amazon Echo, but it also detailed in-depth Nest’s struggle as an Alphabet subsidiary and the apparent horror that was its acquisition of smart home security camera company Dropcam. Before eventually ending his time at the Alphabet company, Dropcam co-founder Greg Duffy apparently told Nest CEO Tony Fadell that he runs the company like a “tyrant bureaucrat”…
Not more than just a few weeks after hearing that it’s lingering trust issues at Google that have kept Alphabet’s Nest division from working on a competitor to Amazon’s Echo speaker, a new report (paywalled) from The Information has revealed that Google itself might be working on a competitor to the Echo. Wait, what?..
Before former Android head Andy Rubin left Google, he headed up Google’s robotics efforts. In 2013, Google acquired numerous companies and added 300 robotics engineers. The crown jewel was Boston Dynamics, already known for their animal- and human-like robots. However, Bloomberg is now reporting that Alphabet is selling Boston Dynamics.
Eric Schmidt is in South Korea this week to witness Google’s AlphaGo AI system completely destroy the world Go champion at his own game. Sedol lost the first game yesterday, saying then that he was “very surprised”. Today he lost again. “It was a clear loss on my part,” he said. He had predicted before the matchups began that he would win the five-game series 5-0 or 4-1 “at worst.”
But while the Alphabet Executive Chairman is in South Korea to witness the monumental battle, the Korean press (OSEN, in this case) is clearly focusing on something else. As you can see in the pictures below, Schmidt was caught at a press event this week taking pictures with an iPhone…
According to a recent FCC filling, Alphabet’s Life Sciences wing Verily has recently developed a new “Connectivity Bridge” for use in clinical studies. The device is capable of collecting and syncing medical information of people participating in clinical studies, allowing Google to continue to improve its efforts in healthcare.
As was previously announced, Google’s DeepMind project, AlphaGo took on the world’s best Go player, Lee Sedol in the first of five matches yesterday. And it won. While its first victory against a different player was important, beating the 18-time world champion is another matter entirely. This is a momentous victory for AlphaGo, and for the machine learning industry as a whole.
Google said that registration for I/O 2016 would be opening on March 8th, and today is March 8th! You can now head over to the Google I/O website and register to attend the event. There’s no need to be in a hurry, though. Just like previous years, I/O 2016 attendance will be determined based on a lottery system. Register any time between now and March 10, 2016 at 5:00PM PST, and you’ll be on the list…
Google is pushing forward with its Project Loon plans to bring Internet access to remote parts of India as The Economic Times today reported the company is currently in talks with local telecommunications providers.
The publication spoke with Google India chief Rajan Ananda who confirmed the talks with local providers for Loon without naming specific companies, but the report noted telco BSNL among other unnamed companies are actively included in the discussions.
