Category: Google

Ron Amadeo has written a real tale of woe for Ars Technica:

Google Talk, Google’s first-ever instant messaging platform, launched on August 24, 2005. This company has been in the messaging business for 16 years, meaning Google has been making messaging clients for longer than some of its rivals have existed. But thanks to a decade and a half of nearly constant strategy changes, competing product launches, and internal sabotage, you can’t say Google has a dominant or even stable instant messaging platform today.

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These prototypes look great, and the fact that Google designed its own system on a chip for them is really interesting and I bet those new cameras will be a big upgrade over the old sensor in the latest Pixel models, but I’d be a lot more excited if they were up for ordering today.

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Manish Singh has details:

The Android-maker said on Tuesday that starting July 1, it is reducing the service fee for Google Play to 15% — down from 30% — for the first $1 million of revenue developers earn using Play billing system each year. The company will levy a 30% cut on every dollar developers generate through Google Play beyond the first $1 million in a year, it said.

Citing its own estimates, Google said 99% of developers that sell goods and services with Play will see a 50% reduction in fees, and that 97% of apps globally do not sell digital goods or pay any service fee.

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If you had told me a decade ago that this platform would have grown to the size it is today, especially in education, I’m not sure I would have believed you.

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The Apple TV app comes to the $50 streaming device just in time for season 2 of For All Mankind to start tomorrow.

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Google / Nest in an email to customers:

In response to community issues caused by COVID-19, we’re temporarily adjusting your camera quality and bandwidth in an effort to conserve internet resources.

With so many people working and attending school from home, we’re stretching our resources in ways we haven’t before—including the internet. As local internet resources are stretched past their limits, you and many others may have noticed interruptions like dropped video calls or frozen screens. During this time, it’s critical for us to work together to ensure we find ways to help the community at large.

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Frederic Lardinois, writing at TechCrunch:

After Facebook canceled its F8 developer conference and Google itself moved its Cloud Next event in April to a digital-only conference, it doesn’t come as a huge surprise that Google is canceling its I/O developer conference in Mountain View for 2020 as well. The company has sent an email to attendees informing them of the cancellation. The event was originally scheduled to run from May 12 to 14, but because of concerns around the coronavirus, it is now canceling the show.

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Myke and I are in Chicago, where we are doing a live episode of Upgrade with Jason tonight. We both wanted to check out the Pixel 3 and Google’s other new hardware, so Myke and I dropped by Google’s pop-up store here yesterday.

The store is temporary one, and will only be open to the end of the year, but Google did an incredible job with it. As you walk in, you are greeted with a wooden bookcase, populated with products and paint cans showing off the subtle colors the company is using on its hardware.

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Josh Constine at TechCrunch:

A security bug allowed third-party developers to access Google+ user profile data since 2015 until Google discovered and patched it in March, but decided not to inform the world. When a user gave permission to an app to access their public profile data, the bug also let those developers pull their and their friends’ non-public profile fields. Indeed, 496,951 users’ full names, email addresses, birth dates, gender, profile photos, places lived, occupation and relationship status were potentially exposed, though Google says it has no evidence the data was misused by the 438 apps that could have had access.

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Sarah Lewin, writing at Space.com:

The most-viewed eclipse in history had an unexpected witness: A Google Street View car drove right through the path of totality, offering a surprising celestial treat for visitors scoping out the event in Maryland Heights, Missouri.

The intrepid car captured the darkened sky, streetlamps flickering on and even skywatching pedestrians on the vehicle’s travels through the path of the 2017 total solar eclipse in August. Michael Kentrianakis, an eclipse chaser and member of the American Astronomical Society’s Solar Eclipse Task Force, told Space.com about the eye-catching view this past weekend at the 2018 Northeast Astronomy Forum (an annual gathering of thousands of skywatchers in Suffern, New York) after seeing reports of the view circulating online.

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Nice exclusive by Dieter Bohn at The Verge, about Google’s reboot of its mobile messaging strategy:

Instead of bringing a better app to the table, it’s trying to change the rules of the texting game, on a global scale. Google has been quietly corralling every major cellphone carrier on the planet into adopting technology to replace SMS. It’s going to be called “Chat,” and it’s based on a standard called the “Universal Profile for Rich Communication Services.” SMS is the default that everybody has to fall back to, and so Google’s goal is to make that default texting experience on an Android phone as good as other modern messaging apps.

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Jack Nicas and Cade Metz, writing for The New York Times:

Apple has hired Google’s chief of search and artificial intelligence, John Giannandrea, a major coup in its bid to catch up to the artificial intelligence technology of its rivals.

Apple said on Tuesday that Mr. Giannandrea will run Apple’s “machine learning and A.I. strategy,” and become one of 16 executives who report directly to Apple’s chief executive, Timothy D. Cook.

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