Ahead of Q2 2017 earnings this afternoon, Alphabet has announced that Sundar Pichai is joining its board of directors. This move gives Google — the key revenue maker — a second seat on the now 13 member committee responsible for overseeing the sprawling Alphabet conglomerate.
Most of a key Project Loon patent has been cancelled by the US Patent and Trademark Office after another company succeeded in convincing the agency that it came up with the idea first.
Project Loon uses free-floating balloons to provide Internet access to remote areas, beaming down Wi-Fi from overhead. The patent which has been cancelled relates to how Alphabet steers the balloons …
A Nasdaq glitch caused a number of major trading platforms to display Alphabet’s share value as $123.47, some 86% below its true value at the time. The incorrect price for Google’s parent company was shown on Bloomberg, Google Finance, Yahoo Finance and others.
According to Recode, Nest has lost its long-time head of industrial design. Overseeing a number of products since 2013, including the recently announced Nest Cam IQ, Rocky Jacob is leaving for European luxury brand LVMH.
Over a year after reports first emerged that Alphabet was going to sell Boston Dynamics, a deal has finally been announced. SoftBank will be acquiring the robotics company, though exact details of the transaction have not been revealed.
Alphabet Class A shares ($GOOGL) hit new record highs today, soaring past the $1,000 per share mark. Alphabet Inc Class A is up 7.80 points on the day, or 0.78%. Alphabet Inc Class C, on the other hand, is straddling the line just below the $1,000 mark, sitting at 983.28 at the time of this writing and up nearly the same amount.
During an interview at the Code Conference this week, Alphabet’s Ruth Porat provided an overview on the state of Google and the Other Bets. The CFO discussed what she sees as the biggest threat to the dominant business, as well as progress on Fiber, X, and more.
Nest has today announced Nest Cam IQ, the latest in its lineup of home security cameras and the new indoor offering to beat from the Alphabet-owned maker of smarthome products. The camera packs new higher-quality video, much more powerful speakers, a crisp and clean new design, and built-in security features. Overall, as the name suggests, it’s just smarter and better…
According to a research note from Morgan Stanley analysts Brian Nowak and Adam Jonas (via Business Insider), Alphabet’s Waymo self-driving car unit could be worth as much as $70 billion. The analysts furthermore told investors that Waymo would be a good spin out candidate and that its value is not being taken into account in Alphabet’s current stock price…
As part of its broader research into life sciences, Verily is tackling mental health by using technology to allow for earlier diagnosis and intervention. However, the Alphabet division has lost a major hire, with Dr. Thomas Insel departing.
Alphabet has just published Q1 2017 earnings of $24.75 billion, up 22% from the same quarter last year. These numbers cover the first three months of the year and beat analyst expectations, with the stock up 4% in after-hours trading.
Ahead of the first earnings report for 2017 this afternoon, Alphabet CEO Larry Page has penned a founders’ letter recapping the previous year. Providing an overview on the progress of the various Alphabet bets, Page also touched on machine learning and AI.
A relatively new startup by the name of Kitty Hawk is showing off its all-electric flying ‘car’ for the first time today, almost a year since we first learned that Alphabet CEO Larry Page is one the startup’s biggest backers. While often referred to as a flying car, it’s obvious now that what Kitty Hawk has been working on for the last couple of years is more accurately described as a human-carrying drone…
Following last week’s announcement of the Study Watch, Verily is starting its four-year study to quantify good health with biometric data. In better understanding health, Baseline hopes to ultimately prevent diseases, as the Alphabet division continues work on other health gadgets.
For the past two years, Verily — previously known as Google Life Sciences — has been working on a wearable that records vast amounts of health data. The Alphabet company is now showing off the rather sleek Verily Study Watch for the first time.
A little over a month ago, Google‘s parent company Alphabet — or, more specifically, its Waymo subsidiary — filed a lawsuit against Uber, which allegedly stole key information with regard to its self-driving technology.
Given that, beyond the lawsuit itself, Uber’s reputation is at stake, the ride-hailing company has tried to deny the accusations and kept things as quiet as possible ever since, but the Mountain View giant doesn’t seem to be exactly on the same page…
Following the pause in deployment to new cities and other smaller mishaps in recent months, Alphabet has reassigned two Access executives (via Bloomberg). These personnel moves of these executives are especially notable given their stature and experience in telecommunication.
With April Fools’ Day falling on a weekend this year, the festivities are occurring slightly earlier. Like last year, we’ll be covering all the gag products and services from Google and Alphabet, as well as the best ones from the rest of the tech industry.
Formerly Google Ideas, Jigsaw is an Alphabet company aimed at using technology to “make people in the world safer.” Their latest project uses machine learning to identify toxic online comments and is intended to help foster harassment-free discussions.
Astro Teller, the head of Alphabet’s X unit, is today holding a press conference to discuss the ongoing progress of the Mountain View company’s Project Loon initiative. Among other things, Teller said that Loon is ditching the idea of having a “constant stream” of balloons floating around the globe…
Alphabet’s self-driving car unit hasn’t been a stranger to the inconvenience of constantly rotating staff, but now we’re hearing about one interesting piece of Waymo’s situation in particular that helps explain recent trouble retaining talent. According to a new report out of Bloomberg, early staffers were paid in an unusual way that later severely inflated compensation and led to exodus of early staff…
Last month a report surfaced suggesting that Alphabet was looking to sell off its satellite division, Terra Bella. Google purchased the company — formerly known as Skybox Imaging — back in 2014 for roughly $500 million. Now, in a statement on their website, Planet Labs has announced that it will be purchasing Terra Bella from Google…
The California Department of Motor Vehicles published its Autonomous Vehicle Disengagement Reports for 2016 today, which include statistics on disengagements for all of the companies currently testing self-driving cars in the Golden State. Importantly, Alphabet’s Waymo reported far fewer safety-related disengages and far more miles driven in 2016 compared to 2015, signaling that the company’s system is — as it should — continually getting safer…