In what Bloombergdescribes as ‘a 90-minute interview peppered with expletives,’ Russia’s new Internet advisor has said that he wants to force Google and Apple to pay more taxes.
German Klimenko is pushing to raise taxes on U.S. companies to help level the playing field for Russian competitors such as Yandex and Mail.ru […]
Bloomberg says that he has an interesting ally in this aim …
Google has announced in an official blog post that it’s adding a new flood alert system to its services in India. Thanks to information provided by the Central Water Commission (CWC) users will be able to find flood alerts, including river level info, for more than 170 areas in India where the CWC has active observation stations.
Alerts are available in a number of Google’s apps and services like Google web search, Now cards in the Google app, Google Maps and the Public Alerts homepage on desktop and mobile.
T-Mobile’s Super Bowl ads last night were definitely aimed at millennials. One involved Steve Harvey and referenced Verizon’s “Colorful Balls” ad once again (as well as Harvey’s forgetful stumble on Miss Universe), and the other brought in Drake to show how ridiculous the other carriers could be on the set of “Hotline Bling”…
According to some FCC documents recently unearthed, Alphabet’s X division (formerly Google[x]) has its sights set on disconnecting the cute fully-electric self-driving car prototypes from their wall chargers. Yes, we’re talking wireless charging, the kind that could beam up energy through the bottom of the car using a technology called resonant magnetic induction…
According to a report from The Guardian, Google will soon start showing anti-ISIS ads in search results. The report claims that when a user searches for a topic relating to Islamic extremism or radicalization, they will see ads that encourage them to view the “counter narrative” to their search query.
According to a new report from Variety, Google is among the tech companies negotiating with the NFL for digital rights to Thursday Night Football. Earlier this month, the National Football League inked deals with CBS and NBC to divide the TV rights for Thursday games over the next two seasons, but streaming to non-subscribers was not included in that deal.
Android is an operating system better known for its openness, which means users can enjoy a great deal of customizability and overall choice. It goes far beyond picking up a shiny wallpaper: you can choose your own default apps, tweak the notification center with widgets, add those widgets to your homescreen, and switching to a whole different launcher is an app install away.
That’s why Android users are accustomed to using products and services that go beyond the stock options offered out of the box, and know that the Play Store is quite the well to draw from. Twitter clients are no exception, so keep reading for our roundup of what we think are the best alternatives to Twitter’s default offering…
Update: VentureBeat received information from a source, shedding a little more light on the situation.
A source close to the situation indicates that Google considers this a “unique case” because two apps are required to invoke the ad blocking. Furthermore, the source adds that Google has no problem with browsers which can block ads within themselves via built-in functionality (like Adblock Browser) or via plugins.
Earlier in the week, Samsung’s new browser API meant developers, if they wanted to, could build ad-blocking apps to work alongside the browser. It’s similar to the ad-blocking feature Apple introduced in iOS 9 with Safari, which lead to a number of ad and tracker-blocking apps become popular within the first few weeks of iOS 9’s arrival.
With this feature added, more developers could develop standalone ad-blockers for Android which work with Samsung‘s mobile browser. It turns out however, that Google has pulled some apps, and rejected updates for others. It seems the company isn’t keen on having standalone apps — designed to work alongside browsers to block ads — on the Play Store…
Last week we told you that four more mysterious cities are set to get Alphabet’s self-driving cars in the relatively near future, and now the California company has said (via Reuters) that the next city on the list—following Mountain View, CA and Austin, TX— is Kirkland, Washington…
Google’s longtime Senior Vice President of Search Amit Singhal is leaving the company after 15 years. In a Google+ post, he said that February 26th would be the last day and that he would be looking into philanthropy in the future. Re/Code is reporting that the Search will be merged with the company’s other artificial intelligence and machine learning efforts.
Update 2: People familiar with the matter have said that this isn’t an internal codename for a future project, but rather just referencing the concept of iterative “++” in programming.
Update: Taylor’s LinkedIn profile has been updated to redact mentions of Cardboard++: “In January I began working with the Cardboard team.” Previous version can be seen in a screenshot below.
We know that VR has become much more central to Google’s ambitions lately, but what exactly might the company be working on? According to some evidence scattered across the web, one project in the works might be called “Cardboard++,” a collaboration between the Project Tango augmented reality team and the Cardboard virtual reality team…
Update: Leung has resumed testing with a repaired test device, but for now can only weed out bad cables for now as he still doesn’t have a working Chromebook.
Google engineer Benson Leung was doing a great job at distinguishing the good, the bad and the ugly where USB Type-C cables are concerned, exposing ones that failed to meet the proper specs as well as others that were just plain dangerous.
Unfortunately his testing has now come to an abrupt end as one particularly bad cable resulted in significant damage to both his Chromebook Pixel and the USB PD sniffer devices he was using …
Tech companies make baffling decisions all the time, it’s not a rare occurrence. In most cases, while we’re scratching our heads, we can normally sort-of see a reason or some kind of logic behind those moves. Whether it’s OnePlus’ unusual marketing strategies, Google launching the Pixel C without multi-window multitasking or HTC’s decision to launch an iPhone clone. In the case of Turing Robotics, I’m stumped…
One of Google’s latest slogans created to showcase the essence of Android in a nutshell spells: “Be together, not the same.” It is both a testament to the company’s general embracement of diversity and arguably one of the most precise ways to describe the OS as a whole. Fans, however, have long had trouble trying to identify the ‘ultimate’ Android device, despite the sea of devices whose supposed heterogeneity should guarantee a perfect match for everyone.
In an endless fight among the various OEMs to come out at the top of the critics’ — as well as the fans’ — rankings, one trend has notoriously stood out. People love Android devices because of the software (specifically its flexibility), and in spite of the countless efforts made by manufacturers to tweak and enhance the OS in order to make it better, the pure, unadulterated experience offered by Google has long been preferred by virtually every enthusiast.
Be it because of its simplicity and cleanliness, dedication to Google’s brand, or the sheer fact that updates are not hampered by carriers and other third parties, stock Android has always had the upper hand over UXs such as Samsung’s TouchWiz or HTC’s Sense — at least to those who even know what “TouchWiz” is. To this day, the problem with Google’s vanilla OS still resides almost solely in the hardware it runs on.
Over the weekend, press renders of the Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge leaked via Evan Blass, leaving not much to the imagination for the Korean company’s upcoming Mobile World Congress press conference. Now, the S7 Edge has been outed even more, with references to the unannounced device appearing on one page of Samsung’s own website…
It wasn’t until just recently that the ZenFone Zoom, which ASUS showed off at CES more than a year ago, finally went up for pre-order. Now, you can buy the phone outright in all its leather-backed glory over at B&H for $399 shipped. The main feature that sets this phone apart is its camera with optical zoom, allowing the lenses within to actually move forward and backward physically to offer up to 3x zoom without losing any image quality.
Google’s self-driving cars have notched up almost 1.5 million miles in autonomous mode since the project began in 2009 – but they drive twice as many miles every single day in the lab. Google’s latest monthly report reveals that every software change is tested by using it to simulate driving the entire driving history of the fleet, autonomous and manual.
One benefit of teaching a computer to drive is that it has great memory and recall. With our simulator, we’re able to call upon the millions of miles we’ve already driven and drive those miles again with the updated software. For example, to make left turns at an intersection more comfortable for our passengers, we modified our software to adjust the angle at which our cars would travel. To test this change, we then rerun our entire driving history of 2+ million miles with the new turning pattern to ensure that it doesn’t just make our car better at left turns, but that the changes creates a better driving experience overall …
According to a report from The Guardian, Google is currently in the process of testing solar-powered drones at Spaceport America in New Mexico. The company is reportedly testing the possibility of using these solar-powered drones to deliver high-speed internet from the air. Google, of course, also has its Project Loon effort, which uses high-alitude balloons to beam down internet service to the areas below. It’s unclear, at this point, if the two efforts are related or will be used in different scenarios.
Alphabet’s just-released Q4 earnings has seen its stock price rise in after hours trading, resulting in the Mountain View-based company passing Apple to become the most valuable company in the world. The company’s market capitalization was $517.6 billion at close, and while the price is still fluctuating after hours, Alphabet’s market cap will be over $540 billion tomorrow if these prices hold…
Alphabet has today posted its Q4 2015 earnings and fiscal year 2015 results. The company reports revenue of $21.3 billion, which is up 18%. Net income for Q4 2015 was $3.97 billion. Meanwhile, both Alphabet Class A stock and Class C stock is soaring in after-hours trading, briefly giving Alphabet the top spot as most valuable company in the world.
Material Design has undoubtedly been Google’s most significant effort in showing its renewed commitment towards design.
Despite being born on (and around) the web, however, it took almost a year and a half for Google to finally start updating its beloved Chrome browser to the new language.
As first spotted by The Next Web, a few screenshots posted within a recently-filed Google Code request show that the yet to be released version 50 of Chrome OS is being tweaked to reflect the changes, taking a few steps further from what we saw with v48… Expand Expanding Close
A report today is saying that Google wants to become more like Apple in its Nexus lineup of phones and tablets – that is to say it wants more control over the marketing and building of its products. But can Google build up its hardware engineering at the same time without alienating its hardware/carrier partners and even Apple? … Expand Expanding Close
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