A little late in the day news dump for you, ahead of the upcoming holiday. Longtime Google executive Eric Schmidt announced today that he’ll be stepping down from his role as the executive chairman of Alphabet’s board of directors. Alphabet has confirmed the move with TechCrunch, offering up a statement from Schmidt. “Larry, Sergey, Sundar […]
How much of your digital life would you lose if you lost a single password? Without it, you are locked out and the cold reality of using free cloud services like Google is that you don’t have a human arbiter to help you. If you think back to earlier times where, say you lost your bank […]
The days of buying devices or smart assistants will be over soon enough. Amazon and Google have both made clear their intention to make their respective AI device agnostic, so the days of the standalone Google Home or Amazon Echo might well be numbered. Assistant and Alexa are already being built into everything from thermostats […]
Just over a year ago, Google announced a major change to the way its search index will rank sites: it will go mobile-first. As the company explained at the time, Google’s algorithms will eventually primarily use the mobile version of a website’s content to rank its pages, to understand structured data, and to show snippets […]
Creating convincing artificial speech is a hot pursuit right now, with Google arguably in the lead. The company may have leapt ahead again with the announcement today of Tacotron 2, a new method for training a neural network to produce realistic speech from text that requires almost no grammatical expertise. The new technique takes the […]
For a technology that the average person has probably never heard of, Kubernetes surged in popularity in 2017 with a particular group of IT pros who are working with container technology. Kubernetes is the orchestration engine that underlies how operations staff deploy and manage containers at scale. (For the low-down on containers, check out this […]
Google today is expanding its booking features for travelers using Google services including Trips, Flights and hotel search, with a focus on helping people find better rates. For example, Google can now tell you the best time to buy an airline ticket or see when room rates are higher, among other things. These price-tracking features […]
Apple has more cash than any other technology company on the planet. Yet, to date, that hasn’t translated into spending on acquisitions. Over the past five years, Apple has spent the least on M&A out of all the “Big Five” most valuable U.S. technology companies, a Crunchbase News analysis finds. That’s despite the fact that […]
Google announced today that it’s shutting down its high-end smartphone augmented reality platform, Tango, in order to focus on the more mass market ARCore product. The company had already confirmed this much to us when they announced ARCore in August, but now we have an official timeline for Tango’s demise. Tango support will cease March 1, 2018. […]
Google is preparing to use light beams to bring rural areas of the planet online after it announced to a planned rollout in India. The firm is working with a telecom operator in Indian state Andhra Pradesh, home to over 50 million people, to use Free Space Optical Communications (FSOC), a technology that uses beams of light […]