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Google is rolling out a couple notable updates to its Google Translate apps that adds additional languages for translations of printed text and support for the new Split View app mode on iPads.
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Update: Never mind. Qualcomm says that this is no longer a thing. It looks like the software on the phones being demoed at the India launch event are running old software.
Both the Nexus 5X and 6P are getting some special camera features thanks to improved hardware, and now we’ve learned about one more. Thanks to the device’s launch in India (and one hands-on video in particular), we’re getting another look at the device’s Settings app, and within there’s something interesting: Nexus 6P (and the Nexus 5X) will support “Double twist for camera”…
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Image: Forbes
As unsurprising as it may be, an early Twitter investor came out several months to say that Google still doesn’t understand social and should buy struggling Twitter. And while that hasn’t quite happened (and we don’t really have any hard evidence that it will), it appears that ties between the two companies are strengthening. Twitter’s once-again-CEO Jack Dorsey has today announced that Google’s previous chief business officer Omid Kordestani has been appointed as the social network’s executive chairman.
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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.
Android Police this evening has spotted a minor change to the Google Play support page for Play gift cards. The webpage has been changed to include a reference to something called “music gifts,” although it’s entirely unclear what they are at this point.
As Android Police suggests, it’s possible that this could be a way to gift people albums and songs on Play Music. It’s also possible that it will be a way to gift an actual Play Music All Access subscription for ‘x’ amount of months to other users. Whatever music gifts are, they will be available in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
All of this is pure speculation at this point, however. Nevertheless, it seems likely that Google is preparing something to announce soon, given the change to its support page today.
Google today has acquired the app-hosting service Divshot and will fold it into its cloud services provider Firebase, Divshot cofounder Michael Bleigh accounted in a blog post. Divshot is a platform that allows developers to build mobile and web applications easily. Divshot itself will be shut down on December 14th, although the company has already instituted a migration plan.
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Google has today launched a couple of new products for Google Cloud Platform customers: Google Cloud Datalab, and Google Cloud Shell. Both of them are available via the web today in beta form…
Here’s the scoop on Cloud Datalab:
Google Cloud Datalab, available today in Beta is a web-based interactive developer tool that allows you to get insights from your raw data and explore, share, and publish reports in a fast, simple and cost-effective way. Cloud Datalab combines the power of Google BigQuery and Google Cloud Storage with familiar data science ecosystems built around IPython, removing the need for complex integration between products.
And here’s the gist on Cloud Shell:
Our customers want to be able to easily manage their infrastructure and applications when running on Google Cloud Platform no matter where they are. Building on the ability to SSH from the browser we released for Google Compute Engine VM instances last year, today we’re launching Google Cloud Shell Beta, which extends from just VMs to all aspects of the platform.
These announcements are certainly irrelevant for the vast majority of regular users, but for those of you out there that are running apps on Google’s Cloud Platform, you have a couple of new tools. On a somewhat related note, an Amazon Web Services VP accidentally showed a picture of Google’s data centers at re:Invent last week.
Update: A report out of Re/code says that these drones aren’t actually Project Wing drones. They’re rather being registered for the company’s other drone project, Project Titan, which intends to provide internet access to remote or disaster-stricken locations. Google’s Project Titan is not to be confused with Apple’s Project Titan.
A couple of months ago, a report surfaced suggesting that Google was sidestepping FAA regulations by getting special approval from NASA to test its Project Wing delivery drones in the US. Now, it looks like the company (via Engadget) is actually getting approval for at least a couple of drones, as evidenced by a couple of entries in the FAA’s official registry…
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This is kind of humorous. At Amazon’s AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas last week, Amazon Web Services Vice President of Infrastructure Jerry Hunter accidentally showed a generic picture of one of Google’s data centers. This is the kind of minor mishap that usually goes completely unnoticed, but not this time. Google’s Urs Hölzle came out on Google+ late yesterday to point out the mistake, taking the opportunity to brag about Google Cloud Platform as “the world’s best infrastructure”…
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Google is going global with its affordable Virtual Reality platform. The Mountain View company has announced today that its Google Cardboard app is now available in 39 languages across 100 countries, and that the Cardboard developer documentation is also now published in 10 languages to help even more developers build Cardboard experiences…
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Google has announced today that the number of countries with local versions of YouTube is growing to 85, with the additional of 7 new territories and countries. As of today, there is now a localized version of the web’s most popular video streaming site in the Adriatics, the Baltics, Bulgaria, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Belarus…
The news comes from Google’s official YouTube blog:
We want to make sure the videos you see when you fire up YouTube are relevant to you, wherever you’re watching. That’s why we’re launching even more local country versions of YouTube, connecting fans with creators in their home countries and giving those creators a way to earn money from their popularity. With the addition of the Adriatics, Baltics, Bulgaria, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Belarus, YouTube now has local versions in 85 countries.
While it’s easy to have a biased perspective on the world when you live in the US, Google says that more than 80% of YouTube’s views come from people outside the US. And with content creators and consumers speaking dozens of languages and creating an unthinkable amount of content, it makes sense to be able to connect to the community in your physical vicinity.
Reports surfaced last week suggesting that Google was in talks to invest in secure messaging startup Symphony, and a new report out Monday morning (via Re/code) suggests that the company is about to announce $100 million in funding raised in a recent round from several investors including — as was reported — the Mountain View company…
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Sundar Pichai was given the title of Google CEO as part of the company’s Alphabet restructure and now Pichai has made his first changes according to Re/code. In a company wide email sent out recently, the Google CEO appointed three executives to new roles…
Google first introduced app indexing for iOS apps in search back in May, allowing in-app content to appear in search results with links that send users directly to an app. The feature was originally only available in the Google app and Chrome browser, but now Google is launching an updated version of the framework that will make the app links also appear in Google search results in Safari.
Getting your app content found on Google just got easier. App Indexing is now compatible with HTTP deep link standards for iOS 9, as it has been on Android from the beginning. That means that you can start getting your app content into the Search results page on Safari in iOS, simply by adding Universal Links to your iOS app, then integrating with our SDK.
Developers simply need to support the Universal Links standard to get their apps to show up in search results. Users will begin to see the app indexing links showing up in Safari on iOS by the end October.
Devs can read more on how to support the feature here.
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Last week, we told you that a former Google employee managed to buy the Google.com domain name via Google’s own Domains service. While Sanmay Ved may have only owned the world’s most-visited domain for just a minute or two before the Mountain View company caught on and cancelled the transaction, it appears at least some good came of this story.
Once Google acknowledged the mistake, they rewarded Ved with some unknown sum of cash — but the company decided to double the reward when Ved generously suggested it go to charity instead…
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Largely heralded as the creator of Android (and as of last year, no longer at Google), Andy Rubin yesterday took to the hotseat at the Code/Mobile conference to talk the future of computing. Now founder and CEO of tech startup incubator Playground Global, his job is to know what’s coming in tech “after mobile” — and he had some very insightful comments indeed…
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Apparently owning abc.xyz isn’t enough for the newly-formed conglomerate headed up by Google’s co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Thanks to a recent change in DNS registrant info, we now know that Google has (via DomainInvesting) acquired abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz.com, a site that was first registered all the way back in 1999…
Prior to Google’s new ownership, the domain was privately owned and wasn’t being used for anything. We don’t know yet — and probably won’t ever know — what Google paid for the name, but it’s likely to be a hefty amount if it was acquired after the Alphabet announcement. We also don’t know what Google will use the domain for, but it wouldn’t be surprising to see it redirect to abc.xyz.
Google announced the major restructuring of its entire organization just a couple of months ago, starting with the creation of a brand-new company called Alphabet, Inc., which is now the parent company of Google and many other now-separate divisions of the company. Previous SVP of Android/Chrome/Google Apps Sundar Pichai now serves as CEO of Google.
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Google has today released a new app called Delhi Public Transport Offline and, well, most people probably don’t need it. But if you do happen to live in Delhi and would like a very simple app to help you get around town via public transportation, today’s your lucky day — it’s free, and it’s packed with lots of features that might make a quick download worth your time…
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If you’re an Android Pay holdout, you might have found this morning that tap and pay has stopped working with the old Google Wallet app. Google has been warning users since Android Pay first became available three weeks ago that they need to update to the new app to keep using tap and pay, and now the Mountain View company is requiring it…
This is unfortunate for users who prefer to keep their device rooted for a variety of reasons. While rooted devices worked fine with tap and pay through Google Wallet, Android Pay — touting its high levels of security and all — doesn’t play along very well. The new Google Wallet app doesn’t offer tap and pay functionality at all.
If you’re seeing this message and need to update to Android Pay, head over to the Play Store. And if you’re looking for the new Google Wallet (which is available through a completely new listing), you can find that over at Google Play as well.
With Google having recently announced the brand new LG and Huawei-made Nexus 5X and Nexus 6P, it could be the perfect time to pick up last year’s “Pure Android” flagship. The Motorola Nexus 6 recently got dropped to just $349 on Amazon, but a third-party reseller on eBay has just undercut that price by a cool $50. You can buy last year’s stock Android flagship for just $299.
As far as specs go, the Nexus 6 still holds up really well. In fact, it’s still my daily driver. That’s mostly to do with how smoothly it runs Android 6.0 Marshmallow which I’ve been running since Dev Preview 2. It has a huge 5.9-inch QuadHD display, stereo front-facing speakers, 3220mAh battery with QuickCharge and Qi charging support along with Snapdragon’s powerful quad-core 805-series processor.
The eBay listing notes that quantities are limited, so if you’re wanting to snag the N6 as cheaply as possible, you should do so before inventory vanishes.
With the debate over ads and the speed of the mobile web growing every day, many web companies like Apple and Facebook have pushed for publishers to hand over their content in the name of a better experience for users. But content creators — for the most part — don’t want to do that, and Google knows that. So today, the Mountain View company has announced the Accelerated Mobile Pages initiative, a plan it’s leading to make the mobile web faster…
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