Google

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has been very outspoken about President Donald Trump’s recent immigration executive order, having just a few days sent a memo to Google employees saying that “it’s painful to see the personal cost of this executive order on our colleagues.” Now he has come out (via an interview with Walt Mossberg at The Verge) to speak more broadly — albeit briefly — about immigration in Silicon Valley…

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Millions of businesses pay for Google’s G Suite each month, and for good reason ─ Google’s collection of productivity apps are excellent. Today, the company is enhancing G Suite with G Suite Enterprise Edition and several new security and management features.

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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” …

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On the same day that we learned of Google creating it’s largest ever crisis fund to deal with the ongoing impact of Friday’s immigration order, Bloomberg suggests that Trump’s next move could be to target foreign workers employed by Google and other tech companies.

His administration has drafted an executive order aimed at overhauling the work-visa programs technology companies depend on to hire tens of thousands of employees each year … 

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In a memo sent to employees Friday (first obtained by Bloomberg), Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai criticized President Donald Trump’s recent immigration order, which restricts citizens of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, and Libya from entering the US. Pichai said that more than 100 Google staff are impacted by the order, and recommended they get back the US as soon as possible.

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When it comes to protecting your smartphone fully, LifeProof has long been one of your best options. By simply installing this case, you’re not only adding drop and screen protection, but also waterproofing it for up to two meters of water. At $90, this is definitely one of the most expensive, but maybe one of the best, premium cases you can get for complete Pixel protection…

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Daydream is Google’s newest VR platform that is a step up from Cardboard, but not as feature-rich as something like the HTC Vive or Oculus Rift. This is because everything is run off of a mobile phone, however, Daydream can still provide an immersive experience. Starting today, Google is allowing all developers to create and publish Daydream VR apps to the Play Store…

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VR is growing fast, whether that’s on desktops and consoles, or on mobile devices. While there’s no doubt that most impressive options have come in the PC-powered section of the market, such as the HTC Vive, we’ve also seen some very capable mobile options, like Samsung’s Gear VR and Google’s Daydream View. Now, the man who led the design team on HTC’s Vive is heading to Google Daydream.

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In a world full of fake news, clickbait headlines, and online scammers, Google is working hard to only display legitimate and trustworthy advertisements on its massive ad network. To achieve this, Google removed over 1.7 billion “bad ads” in 2016 — more than double the number of ads taken down in 2015…

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Samsung’s Galaxy S8 is just weeks from going official, and we already know quite a bit about the device. Several leaks and rumors have pinpointed that the “Bixby” virtual assistant will debut on the S8, presumably as a rival to Google Assistant. Obviously, Google might not be thrilled about that development, but Samsung says that the competition could take AI “to the next level.”

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Google’s Daniel Raynaud today announced a new quick dashboard for Google+ Web that makes it easier to track your follows, post views, comments, +1s, and more. The feature, dubbed Insights, is available to everyone starting this evening.

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Google has announced that of the 30+ teams who signed up for its Lunar XPrize competition to land a privately-funded robot on the moon, five teams have successfully met the requirement to have a verified launch contract in place by the end of last year.

Those five teams will now be competing for the main prize of $20M to be the first to land on the Moon and complete the two required tasks. There is also $5M on offer for the second team to succeed, and smaller prizes for such things as achieving distance targets and visiting historic sites …

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2017 is shaping up to be quite an interesting year in consumer electronics, and smartphones in particular may — finally — become very interesting once again. It’s the destiny of a largely saturated and commoditized market, where in order to thrive the competition needs to push the innovation pedal. Polarization is a phenomenon we observe in this market, as increasingly cheaper smartphones become good enough, and consumers become more reluctant to buy decidedly more expensive devices that don’t add much to the basic experience provided by solid, lower-end phones.

On the high end of the spectrum, a brand’s sole power and image become less and less of a reason to shell out the (significant and growing) extra amount of money, and new advancements — whether in design, software or some cool new tech — need to emerge to justify it. Companies can either settle (and risk becoming irrelevant) or innovate and skyrocket to the top (and the future). In this situation, staying in the middle could mean spreading too thin and not being able to stand out and keep up with the competition. This, in my opinion, is the case of OEMs like HTC, LG, Sony or Motorola; but, more interestingly, OnePlus…

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There has been quite a huge advertising campaign for the Google Pixel, both by carriers and the Mountain View giant itself. And, as it turns out, the massive spending seems to have worked: a report from Wave7 Research (via Fierce Wireless) focused on Verizon is in fact describing very good results…

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Google has promised a lot for the future of Google Assistant, but there’s still a lot of work to do until we get all the features seen in the original demonstrations. One thing we saw on stage back in October was Assistant interacting with various paid services, and in the latest update to the Google app, the company is taking the first step towards making those integrations official.

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With how much our lives reside on the internet either through a web browser or an application on our phones, it is important that everyone’s private data stays secure and of course, private. To do this, companies and developers are implementing encryption into their programs. The issue, according to Google, is that there is no easy to use, generic way to identify and authenticate a user’s public encryption keys…

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