Area 120

Last year, Google’s Area 120 incubator introduced a Waze-like crowdsourcing app for public transit in New York City. Pigeon for iOS is now available in five more US cities, while an Android app is coming.

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Announced last September, Touring Bird is a simple website that curates things travelers can do on a city-by-city basis. The Area 120 project will be shutting down next month as the Touring Bird team joins Google’s unified Travel initiative.

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Area 120 — Google’s workshop for experimental projects — has produced social networks, travel tools, and educational apps. Recently, the group has veered toward business services, with the latest being Byteboard, an interview tool that measures real-world technical skills.

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Area 120 is “Google’s workshop for experimental projects,” and its latest prototype is Game Builder. The Mac and Windows app is a sandbox for people without programming or artistic experience to create games in a familiar Minecraft-esque environment.

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Rivet launched in beta last year as a “fun and supportive reading app for kids.” Developed by Google’s internal Area 120 incubator, it’s exiting beta today on Android and iOS.

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Area 120 is “Google’s workshop for experimental projects” and its latest service is “CallJoy.” Aimed at small businesses, it is essentially Call Screen for spam blocking and Google Duplex for automated help rolled into one product.

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Area 120 is an incubator within Google that allows employees to develop experimental products. Grasshopper was announced last year as a mobile app for Android and iOS that teaches coding through short puzzles. Google today provided a usage update on this learning tool in time for the new year.

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Earlier this year, Google’s internal Area 120 incubator unveiled Reply as a smart response toolbar appended to notifications on Android. In an email today, Google revealed that it is ending the experiment.

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The latest project out of Google’s Area 120 incubator is called Touring Bird and it’s a simple website that helps travelers find things to do. Curated by city, it brings together various activities and provides a comparison to help users get the cheapest deals from multiple tour providers.

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Last month, Google confirmed that it was developing an experimental podcasting app called “Shortwave.” Now, we have a clearer idea of what this Area 120-developed project could be and it points to a grand vision of an app that delivers only personalized and relevant snippets of podcasts.

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Google Podcasts officially launched in June with the company already previewing AI-powered features that are coming in the future. This includes audio one-day being surfaced alongside text and video as Search results. Given the importance, Google’s in-house incubator is developing another experimental podcast player called “Shortwave.”

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Google’s Area 120 incubator is home to a number of nifty apps and services like Reply and an upcoming social ‘Arcade’ game. Till that launches, the latest app is called Pigeon and it crowdsources the city of New York’s public transit to create a Waze-like map of real-time updates.

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Last month, we spotted Reply working on a new smart toolbar to compliment its existing set of smart messaging response capabilities. That update is rolling out now to the beta along with a new general redesign for the app and service.

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Google’s grand social ambitions have mostly tapered down following the failure of the original Google+. The latter social network is now focused on communities, while social features exist in apps like Google Duo and Photos. However, a new report today reveals that Google is working on social games, with a launch as soon as this summer.

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One of Android P’s highlight features is a revamp to notifications with inline images and smart reply. Meanwhile on a parallel track, Google’s Area 120 incubator recently released Reply, which adds similar smart suggestions to all apps, among other intelligent features. An upcoming update might make notifications even more powerful on Android P.

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