Before the launch of Android and the T-Mobile G1, Steve Jobs had quite a close relationship with Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Rare pictures of Jobs, Page, and then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the Googleplex have surfaced today.
Eric Schmidt was Google’s second CEO from 2001 to 2011 and famously known for acting as “adult supervision” during the company’s early years. The top job was eventually handed back to co-founder Larry Page, with Schmidt serving as executive chairmen of Google and later Alphabet. His last role was as technical advisor, and it emerged today that he departed earlier this year.
Following Alphabet’s Q1 2019 earnings yesterday, the parent company announced a number of changes to its board of directors. Eric Schmidt and Diane Greene are not seeking re-election and will be leaving later this year.
In late December, Alphabet announced that Eric Schmidt was stepping down as executive chairman. Reports pegged the departure as a result of the former Google CEO wanting to spend more time working on other efforts and we now know what that entails. MIT has revealed that Schmidt is joining the school as a “visiting innovation fellow.”
Alphabet announced today that Eric Schmidt is stepping down as the company’s executive chairman. Schmidt will transition to a new role as a technical advisor and will continue to serve on the company’s board.
Executive chairman of Google parent Alphabet Eric Schmidt last week told employees that the Trump administration will do ‘evil things,’ reports Buzzfeed.
Schmidt’s remarks were made during the company’s weekly meeting at its headquarters in Mountain View, California, on January 26 [when he said the Trump administration] is “going to do these evil things as they’ve done in the immigration area and perhaps some others” …
Alphabet Chairman Eric Schmidt is sitting down with Startup Grind Europe today. Tune in below:
In this week’s top stories: We breakdown the best Android phones you can buy right now, get a closer look at upcoming Android devices including the OnePlus 3, Galaxy Note, and Project Tango devices, and give you the latest app news and updates alongside our picks for the best 5 Android apps you should download this month.
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Talking Schmidt fans have something to look forward to later this month: the Alphabet executive chairman and former Google CEO is set to speak at the first Startup Fest in Amsterdam on May 24th. Eric Schmidt is among several big name keynote speakers, including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Uber founder Travis Kalanick, and Airbnb CTO Nathan Blecharczyk. Google is among the list of sponsors for the first Startup Fest as well.
Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt recently attended what many call “Burning Man for the 1%” with a handful of fellow tech and entrepreneur colleagues (via The Guardian). The festival is called Further Future and covers 49 acres of land right outside of Las Vegas. While Burning Man hides its lavishness, Further Future touts that it offers “unabashed luxury.”
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.
Speaking in South Korea (where he was also seen using an iPhone), Eric Schmidt addressed the possibility of Google’s driverless cars expanding outside of the United States. In an interview with The Telegraph, Schmidt explained that UK officials have approached the company about bringing its self-driving vehicles to the streets.
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…
Today, United States Secretary of Defense Ash Carter announced plans to establish a Defense Innovation Advisory Board made up of about a dozen technology leaders from Silicon Valley and beyond. Representing “Secretary Carter’s enduring commitment to building lasting partnerships between the public and private sectors,” the board “will provide advice on the best and latest practices in innovation that the department can emulate.”
And who better to lead such a group than Alphabet Chairman and ex-CEO of Google Eric Schmidt?
Speaking at a conference in New York today, Google chairman Eric Schmidt discussed how he believes artificial intelligence could one day help the world solve its “hard problems,” including issues like population growth, climate change, human development, and education. Schmidt explained that because of the fast pace at which AI technology is being developed, it can help scientists determine the relationship between the cause and effects of such issues by quickly analyzing large amounts of data (via Bloomberg).
Raspberry Pi Zero launched today, touted as “the $5 computer,” and it turns out (via The Wall Street Journal), that its existence — or at least its announcement today, before the launch of a more expensive Raspberry Pi — is partly thanks the words of none other than ex-Google CEO and now Alphabet Inc. chairman Eric Schmidt…
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Back in the summer, Google announced a major new restructure and rebranding, with Google itself just one of many companies now owned by Alphabet. The move caught us all by surprise, and seemingly, caught Eric Schmidt by surprise too. Re/code was able to get hold of some recordings where the former Apple man stated he was on vacation when the company announced the move.
I wake up, and I’m the chairman of Alphabet. We sort of announced it without actually knowing which companies it would be. So we’re still working the details.
With Alphabet, each company within the group is given its own letter. Google, for instance, is ‘G’, and ‘L’ stands for Life Sciences. With there only being 26 letters in the alphabet, you might wonder what they’ll do when they’ve used all 26 of them. Schmidt’s answer: “After 26, we’re going to probably transcendental numbers”. Numbers like pi… “You think I’m kidding?”
Alphabet may have to start using them soon if Schmidt’s other comments are to be taken seriously. We’re to expect “a lot” of new companies: ““I’ve been meeting with the current CEOs of the Alphabet companies and the proposed ones. So you’ll see a lot coming.” He didn’t say what those new companies would be, but he apparently praised the innovation within the self-driving car move.
Schmidt was talking at the Virtuous Circle conference in Menlo Park, California when he made the comments. He spoke on many matters, including policy issues like encryption, the ‘Right to be Forgotten‘ policies in Europe and bandwidth regulation among others. Like many, he’s worried about the tech scene in Europe, especially the Safe Harbor ruling which sees each country have its own digital borders, and their own set of regulations.
Alphabet is still in its early days, and like many of us, it seems Schmidt is excited to see what lies in the future.
Lobbying group Citizens for Tax Justice has called out Google, Apple and Microsoft and others for what it described as “accounting tricks” in which companies “pretend” to be based overseas for tax purposes. The claims were made in a report entitled Offshore Shell Games 2015.
Many multinational corporations use accounting tricks to pretend for tax purposes that a substantial portion of their profits are generated in offshore tax havens, countries with minimal or no taxes where a company’s presence may be as little as a mailbox. Multinational corporations’ use of tax havens allows them to avoid an estimated $90 billion in federal income taxes each year.
Google’s overseas tax arrangements came under fire in the UK back in 2013 when it was revealed that the company paid just £6M ($9.4M) on a UK turnover of £395M ($620M), claiming that all its advertising sales were made by staff in Ireland (a claim later challenged) …
Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google parent company Alphabet, has made a thinly-veiled attack on Apple Music in a BBC op-ed on artificial intelligence. He described human-curated music selections as a decade out of data and an elitist approach.
A decade ago, to launch a digital music service, you probably would have enlisted a handful of elite tastemakers to pick the hottest new music.
Today, you’re much better off building a smart system that can learn from the real world – what actual listeners are most likely to like next – and help you predict who and where the next Adele might be …
The long-running dispute between Oracle and Google over whether Java application programming interfaces (APIs) used within Android were protected by copyright has taken another strange turn, with the Justice Dept urging the Supreme Court not to hear Google’s appeal.
The legal battle is over whether small sections of code originally written by Oracle’s predecessor, Sun Microsystems, can be used under the ‘fair use’ exemption to copyright laws. Google argues that it used only small code snippits, did so mostly for consistency and offered to pay royalties; Oracle argues that the code is its intellectual property, and the royalties offered were too low …
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<a href="http://9to5google.com/tag/how-google-works/" target="_blank">Rosenberg & Schmidt promoting their book “How Google Works”</a>
Jonathan Rosenberg has been tapped to temporarily lead Google’s robotics division replacing James Kuffner, according to The Information.
The report cites sourcing claiming Kuffner’s appointment to replace Andy Rubin last year was never intended to be permanent with Rosenberg being the division’s next boss. CEO Larry Page is expected to continue searching for a permanent head of the robotics division in the meantime.
Android’s co-founder Rubin led the robotics division from late 2013 to late 2014. Rosenberg’s appointment now makes the third head of Google’s robotics team in less than two years. Subscribers can read the full report here.
ATP head Regina Dugan with some of her 100-strong team
Google’s mobile-focused research group, Advanced Technology and Projects (ATP), gives projects a maximum of two years’ work before they are killed, adopted as official Google products or sold to outside companies, reports the WSJ.
The deadline was created by former DARPA head Regina Dugan in an attempt to counter the normal tendency of companies to grow less nimble and more bureaucratic as they grow in size, said Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt.
Product cycles slow down as a company gets larger. All of us believe we could execute faster […]
We like this model because it puts pressure on people to perform and do relevant things or stop. I’ve spent an awful lot of time on projects that never end and products that would never ship.
The company is ruthless about killing off projects which don’t deliver notable results, said Dugan, who was hired by Google in 2012, and it doesn’t always let them run as long as two years …
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If you’ve been following the facts behind the situation with Glass, you know that the project is not seen as even close to being dead within the Mountain View company. Despite the Explorer Program being shut down earlier this year, Google clearly sees potential in the platform. And according to comments recently made by Google’s Eric Schmidt, Glass is just far too important to scrap…
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Eric Schmidt spoke today on gender equality in the tech industry at SXSW along with United States Chief Technology Officer (and former Google exec) Megan Smith. During the panel, Schmidt was kind enough to chime in on a number of topics, such as which questions he thought Smith should answer, and his thoughts on the Raspberry Pi.
Schmidt’s frequent interruptions were highlighted by an attendee who questioned the executive on his behavior during the panel. Without responding to the woman’s concerns about cutting off Smith, Schmidt did agree that the lack of women in the industry is “a tragedy.”
