Sundar Pichai

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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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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[UPDATE: Day 1 kicks off at 9am PT today and Google is live streaming the event on YouTube, tune in below…]

Google today announced some notable keynote speakers that will appear at its upcoming Google Cloud Next ’17 Conference scheduled for March 8-10. Among the execs set to make an appearance at the event, Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Executive Chairman of Alphabet Eric Schmidt will be delivering keynotes during the conference that will focus on the latest for the company’s Cloud offerings.

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Google has sent out invitations today to various Indian media for an business-focused event scheduled for January 4th, 2017 in Delhi. Google CEO Sundar Pichai is said to be hosting the event, and India’s Information and Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad is also scheduled to attend…

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Cybersecurity is one of the most important — and talked about — aspects of our digital lives, and a high priority amongst tech companies. Just this past week, Google made it easier for users to adopt its two-factor authentication system, but ironically, it was none other than its CEO Sundar Pichai that saw his account hacked earlier today…

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In this week’s top stories: Samsung unveiled new wearables and wireless earbuds this week as hints at the upcoming Galaxy Note 7 surfaced. We also had some more OnePlus 3 announcements and leaks ahead of an official launch, talk of Huawei manufacturing Googles’ next Nexus device, and an interview with Google’s Sundar Pichai discussing Nexus phones and a number of other topics. Head below for the handy links to these and our other top stories from this week. 
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Google CEO Sundar Pichai took the stage at Recode’s Code Conference 2016 today, and while much of what he said were PR-friendly reiterations, he did elaborate and provide more color on some of the moves Google made at I/O late last month. Of course the topics of artificial intelligence, Google Home, Android OEMs, the Nexus program, search, and others came up, and Pichai also elaborated on Google’s bigger plans for the world — namely China and India…
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Update: In a comment made to TNW, a Telegram spokesperson denied all acquisition rumors with a strongly-worded rebuttal.

“This is complete bullshit. There were no acquisition talks, no plans for any such thing either.”

You may remember quite a few years ago, it was rumored that Google was looking in to buying WhatsApp for $1 billion, and again later on for $10 billion. Both times, those rumors were denied by Google and — of course — we now know that even if they did bid, the deal didn’t go down.

Facebook bought the popular messaging app for a cool $19B, but Google seemingly hasn’t given up on strengthening its messaging portfolio. Reports from Russia are claiming that Google chief, Sundar Pichai once met with Telegram’s founder to discuss a $1 billion acquisition.

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Every year, Larry Page and Sergey Brin write a Founders’ Letter to inform stockholders of recent developments and their vision for the future. For 2016, Page had recently-anointed Google CEO Sundar Pichai write the letter as a majority of ‘bets’ are under his purview. The letter focuses on six main areas.

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According to an extensive profile piece from BuzzFeed’s Mat Honan this morning, Google’s now-CEO Sundar Pichai announced Google Cardboard having not even seen the final product. The piece details how Clay Bavor, Google’s VP of VR, first showed Pichai the project just 8 weeks before I/O, and Pichai was so impressed that he wanted to give the virtual reality viewer a full debut at the company’s developer conference…

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It has been a wild 24 hours when it comes to smartphone encryption and user privacy versus national security. Last night, a U.S. judge ruled that Apple must help the FBI obtain data from a passcode-locked iPhone 5c used by one of the gunmen in the fatal San Bernardino shooting. Just hours later, Apple CEO Tim Cook responded by posting an open letter on Apple’s homepage saying that Apple would not comply with the court’s request. Now, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has chimed in on the matter, saying that he agrees with Cook.

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After successful Q4 2015 earnings and a brief time as the most valuable company in the world, Alphabet is awarding Sundar Pichai and other top executives lucrative stock grants. Pichai’s award of 273,328 Class C shares worth $199 million would make him one of the highest-paid executives of a public company.

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai has announced that the company will be rolling out its recently-launched in-app Tap to Translate feature in India in the first quarter of 2016. The feature offers a simple way to translate text from within third-party apps like chat apps and Facebook.

Our most active users in India translate between Hindi and English multiple times a day, spending lots of time copying messages from friends or colleagues, translating them, writing responses, translating their responses, and then pasting them back into an app. With Tap to Translate you can copy text anywhere on your Android phone and instantly get the translation, right then and there — without ever leaving the app. No more copy/paste, no more app switching, just instant translations.

All devices that run Marshmallow will get access to the feature …

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A great read and important message from the newly minted, foreign-born CEO of Google.

I walk around the campus where I work and see a vibrant mix of races and cultures. Every one of those people has a different voice … a different perspective … a different story to tell. All of that makes our company an exciting and special place to be, and allows us to do great things together. We are urgently working to become much more diverse, because it’s so important to our future success. I firmly believe that whether you’re building a company or leading a country, a diverse mix of voices and backgrounds and experiences leads to better discussions, better decisions, and better outcomes for everyone.

Head over the Medium for the rest.

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…

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The newly-announced Android Pay is pretty cool – it allows you to pay at retail stores and inside mobile apps without having to take out your wallet or punch a bunch of card details into your glass-screened phone. But the logical conclusion to reducing the friction of paying for things is not tapping my phone against an NFC reader, but rather just not having to take out my phone at all! Well, without the same fanfare that was given to Android Pay, Google said they’ll have a solution for just that.

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Stephen and I are off to Google I/O 2015 this week (the first time we’ve sent 2 people – for double the coverage!) but we wanted to preview what we we’re excited about this week. I’d run through the list of expectations but Chance already made 90% of the list when the sessions were launched. Go check it out. Here’s what I’ve been hearing…
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During an interview at Mobile World Congress 2015 in Barcelona today, Google’s Android chief Sundar Pichai made a few interesting announcements, including confirming the company will launch its own wireless service as an MVNO in the coming months.
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