Google

Some parts of Google’s self-driving car are still mysterious, but slowly more pieces of that mystery are being uncovered. One mystery, in particular, has been the inside of the car. While Google has allowed dozens of journalists, random lucky souls, and Google employees (of course) to ride in the car, only on very few occasions have we been able to see the inside. The company specifically told journalists not to take pictures of the inside at an event earlier this year, and we barely got a glimpse into a very early prototype in Google’s “A First Drive” video last summer. Now, with a couple of patents Google has received, we’re getting a more detailed look inside for the first time…
Expand
Expanding
Close

Black Friday brought some of the best Google-y deals we’ve seen this year, but the fun’s not over yet. Cyber Monday is now here, and — as usual — there are some great discounts to be found all across the web. We found some of the best Android picks earlier today, but here’s a bigger roundup of some of the best-of-the-best Cyber Monday deals you’ll find. For Google lovers and the not-so-Google lovers alike, you’ll almost surely find something in this roundup worthy of adding to your cart…

Expand
Expanding
Close

Craig Barrat was previously Google’s SVP of “access and energy,” but now he leads an Alphabet unit as CEO. That unit is called Access and Energy, and includes Google’s Fiber division as well as several other access and energy-related products (as Google’s Ruth Porat noted in its Q3 2015 earnings call). Now, thanks to an extensive profile of Access today out of Re/code, we have a little bit more of an idea of exactly which projects fall under this group…
Expand
Expanding
Close

Update: A source close to the company tells us Rose is not working on Google’s car project. We are also hearing that he might have been let go at Tesla.

Robert Rose has an impressive resumé as a software engineer. He worked at HP while completing his MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Oregon State University. He then developed award-winning PSP games at Sony such as Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror and Resistance: Retribution.

In 2009, he moved to California to be the lead software engineer for SpaceX’s first Falcon 9 and Dragon flight. He quickly became Director of Flight Software, a position he held until July 2014. After a brief stint at machine learning firm Vicarious, he joined Tesla last May to lead the Autopilot team into the release of v7.0 update, which enabled ‘Autosteer’ and ‘Auto Lane Change’.

According to his LinkedIn profile, Rose left Tesla right after the release of the Autopilot in October and a month later, we learn that he joined Google.
Expand
Expanding
Close

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…
Expand
Expanding
Close

Black Friday is upon us, and that means deals galore. As we mentioned in our gameplan for Apple buyers, though, the biggest “don’t” of Black Friday is to actually go to a physical store. To keep you in the comfort of your home today, we’ve pulled together all of the best deals for Google and Android fans — and all it takes is clicking a few buttons to have these products at your doorstep in a matter of days. Keep reading for the best Google-y Black Friday deals of 2015…
Expand
Expanding
Close

Google seems to be keeping its options open on what the next generation of Google Glass may look like. We’ve previously seen a larger prism reportedly destined for the Enterprise Edition, and last week heard that the company is working on two audio-based models without a screen via Project Aura.

A Google patent granted this week now shows two different approaches to a flexible version of the wearable (see below for the second one), worn over only one ear, and with the option of a display viewable by both eyes … 
Expand
Expanding
Close

The AMP Project — to speed up and improve mobile web pages — is picking up steam since its announcement six weeks ago, and now we know that it’s expected to launch in an official capacity early next year. A bevy of new media organizations and ad tech companies have announced their support and commitment to the open source project, as well.

Expand
Expanding
Close

According to a recent filing with the FCC, Google is looking to test something with experimental radios that use a wireless spectrum in all 50 states and in Puerto Rico. The details on these tests are incredibly sparse at this point, but Google wants to start the process on January 1st and test for 24 months (via BI).

Expand
Expanding
Close

If you’re looking to buy some Google-y phones and tablets and laptops and smartwatches for your loved ones this holiday season, look no further. We’ve had our hands on most Android phones, Android Wear smartwatches, and Chromebooks to come out over the last 12 months, and now it’s time to decide which are the best of the best. Read on…
Expand
Expanding
Close

I used a Nexus 5X throughout most of October (and was very frustrated with it), but earlier this week the LG V10 showed up at my doorstep — and I just had to give it a shot for a couple weeks. Although my opinion may be skewed thanks to my less than joyful experience with the 5X, I actually found the LG V10 to be a contender for best handset I’ve used this year. It’s huge and heavy, yes, but at least for me, it’s more than feature-complete enough. And it’s especially great when you ditch LG’s software…
Expand
Expanding
Close

Google has today updated its Transparency Report with more examples of ‘right to be forgotten‘ requests it has received, stating in each case whether it accepted or rejected the request. This follows other examples last year of easy and difficult cases.

The cases make it clear that Google has to balance fairness to the individual against the wider public interest. For example, while it might agree to remove decades-old information about private individuals, it refused to do so for a public figure in Hungary.

A high ranking public official asked us to remove recent articles discussing a decades-old criminal conviction. We did not remove the articles from search results … 

Expand
Expanding
Close

Over the weekend, executives from Yelp and TripAdvisor noticed that Google was pushing restaurant, or POI results from its services down in favor of its own. Neither of the popular location information services was particularly pleased to see it happening, but Google claims it was due to a “bug” and that it will be fixed…just as soon as possible!

Expand
Expanding
Close

I’m in agreement with most that the Huawei Watch is one of the best Android Wear smartwatches of the year (and thereby one of the best smartwatches of the year, period), and now it’s getting a little better. According to a post on the Huawei Community blog, the device is now getting a minor maintenance release with optimizations all-around a new watch face, and a new app…
Expand
Expanding
Close

Google’s partnership with Lucasfilm and Disney to promote the new Star Wars movie has already seen everything from themed backgrounds in Gmail to an X-Wing marking your position in Google Maps, but the company is not done yet.

Searching for ‘a long time ago in a galaxy far far away’ leads to a great Easter egg, where the results are shown Star Wars intro style. It’s not just a dumb graphic, it’s the real search results, and each is clickable.

And there are Google Cardboard VR experiences (and custom viewers) coming soon … 
Expand
Expanding
Close

The latest numbers in Google’s transparency report show that the search giant currently receives more than 65 million requests a month to remove links to pirated content – which works out at 2M per day, or 1,500 per minute.

That’s a doubling in number in a little over a year, the company reporting that takedown requests hit 1M in August 2014. Go back to 2011, and the numbers were measured in the mere hundreds.

Google introduced a new automated system last year designed to help fight piracy … 
Expand
Expanding
Close

In an exclusive interview with TIME, Google’s chief software engineer Amit Singhal revealed that the company once developed a wearable product which works in a similar manner to the Communicator pin badges worn by the Enterprise crew in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Bluetooth-connected lapel pin could be activated by a single tap and had a built-in microphone…

Expand
Expanding
Close