Google

Google this afternoon updated its Maps app on Android to version 8.2 with a plethora of new features, enhancements, and changes. The biggest changes come to the biking routes that Maps offers. With this update, biking routes now show elevation, including the ability to compare the elevations for various routes. This, of course, means that you can now easily tell which bike routes will be the easiest on your legs. This feature is listed as beta for now, though.

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According to a new report out of The Information, the already tense relationship between Samsung and Google has begun to worsen thanks to both of their own lines of wearables. The report claims that Google CEO Larry Page and Samsung Vice Chairman Jay Y. Lee took part in an a “tense” private meeting at the Allen & Co. conference last week in Sun Valley. The meeting reportedly centered around Page being frustrated that Samsung was investing more in its smartwatches running Tizen than the ones running Android Wear.

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Google has began rolling out an experimental feature on its search engine that makes it easier to find live events on YouTube or Hangouts on Air. A live event will begin showing up in search results up to 3 hours before it starts, providing users with a link that takes them to the event page to watch. A card-like box appears at the top of Google when searching for the name or author of live events. 
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When Android Wear first launched, it was unclear whether Google was going to be offering official support for third-party watch faces. This uncertainty definitely didn’t stop developers from just going ahead and making some, but Google has today come out to say that they’re “hard at work” on an official watch face API.

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RBC analyst Mark Mahaney has put together a cheat-sheet (via re/code) to help make sense of Google’s earnings call, due later today.

The tl;dr version is that gross revenues above $15.65B will be viewed by the market as positive, below $15.55B seen as negative and anything between the two business as usual. The market consensus is for a neutral announcement at around $15.61B and earnings per share of $6.25 – ad growth offset by lower revenues due to more mobile ads, which typically cost less … 
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Google has added yet another official application to its iOS App Store portfolio: Google Analytics. Analytics is Google’s popular service that allows website owners to manage and view data such as page views, demographics, and the technologies users utilize to access the website. The iPhone app also has the neat Real Time reports feature that allows website owners to view how many people are on the website at the current time. Google launched an optimized version of the Analytics app last year on Android and debuted a related AdWords app on iOS just last week. Like all Google apps, the Analytics program is on the the App Store for free.

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London may be an expensive tourist destination, but Google will soon offer the next best thing to hopping on a plane: complete 3D imagery of the entire city. The London Evening Standard reports that every building in London will soon be included.

A Google Maps spokesman said: “Using 45-degree aerial imagery, we’re able to recreate entire metropolitan areas in 3D. This means every building, not just the famous landmarks, the terrain, and any surrounding landscape of trees are included to provide a much more accurate and realistic experience of the city” …

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When Google announced its $3.2 billion acquisition of Nest, many users reacted strongly to the idea of Google having access to their information and data, despite both companies claiming that they wouldn’t share any information. The WSJ published a report last month, however, claiming that Nest and Google eventually planned to share some user data between each other. This report only led to even more privacy uproar. Now, a handful of hackers have taken matters into their own hands and have developed a tool to prevent any user data from be sent back to Nest or Google (via Forbes).

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In a blog post on its official enterprise blog today, Google announced that it is opening up its collection of Google Earth data to businesses. Businesses and governmental organizations will now have the ability to purchase imagery collected by Google and use them for whatever they need. Since it launched 9 years ago, Google Earth has built up an incredible collection of image data, and it only makes sense for the company to continue to profit off of it.

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New Scientist reports that Google is now using Street View cars to detect methane leaks from corroded pipes, landfill sites and other sources.

Sensors strapped to the top of the cars have mapped hundreds of methane leaks around Boston, New York’s Staten Island and Indianapolis […]

Methane leaks are a triple threat: they can cause explosions, accelerate the growth of global warming and waste money. A study last year found that US methane emissions are 1.5 to 1.7 times higher than current estimates, a discrepancy that has been attributed to hard-to-detect leaks …

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Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist and general co-father of the Internet, stopped by The Colbert Report on Comedy Central to discuss the origins of the Web as well as where Cerf sees the Internet going forward.

During the conversation, Cerf noted that “about 3 billion people are online right now,” a number which is unimaginably larger than what the Internet was intended for when it was being developed for the military and academia, and Cerf says we have another 4 billion people to go with expanding online access.

While Colbert comically recommended dropping free AOL CD’s to developing countries to promote the Internet around the world, Cerf pointed seriously to the role of the smartphone in spreading Internet access to third world countries.
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If you have ever wondered how many Bitcoins you can afford with your American dollars, you can now turn to Google. Following in the footsteps of Bing and Yandex, Google has partnered with CoinBase to add a Bitcoin currency conversion tool to its search results. 
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The ability to flag content on the Google Play Store as inappropriate, a feature long available on Android, has recently hit the Web version as well. The link to do just that can now be found on the web interface under Report within the Additional information section of the content’s description. While the feature is likely targeted toward apps that may violate some policy or have a lower-than-appropriate content rating, it does extend to other media like books, music and TV shows, and music distributed on the Google Play Store as well.

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Google on Tuesday announced one of the most highly requested changes to Google+ since the social network debuted over three years ago: no more naming restrictions. Google+ users are now free to use whichever name they desire, whether it is a real name, online pseudonym or combination of the both. 
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Google announced on Tuesday that it has appointed Alan Mulally to its Board of Directors. Mulally served as Ford President and CEO between September 2006 and June 2014, retiring from his post on July 1st. Mulally, who was appointed on July 9th, is serving on Google’s Audit Committee. His knowledge and connections in the automotive industry could be valuable towards the company’s self-driving car initiatives.
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Google has announced a new online training course called Developing Android Apps: Android Fundamentals, featuring Google Developer Advocates Reto Meier, Dan Galpin, and Katherine Kuan. The course delivers step-by-step training on how to develop Android apps, including some of the best practices for Android development and mobile development as a whole. All of the course materials are available for free through the educational website Udacity. 
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Google has released an updated version of the Google Chrome application for iOS today, bringing at least one interesting new feature to the app: mobile websites that have Cast support will now work with all of your Cast-capable devices. It’s unclear how the feature works at the moment, but according to the release notes, developers are going to need to add support to their webpages before they can take advantage of the feature.

Also, as will likely be praised by iOS users everywhere, the version 36.0.1985.49 update goes the way of Google Hangouts and finally gets rid of the infamous “lip” located at the bottom of the app icon:

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