Google X’s raison d’être is embracing far-out ideas, so it’s no surprise, really that former director Mike Cassidy is wading into the decidedly choppy and always controversial waters of nuclear energy. Cassidy, whose most recent tenure at Google found him heading up the company balloon-based internet initiative Project Loon, has been quietly working on launching Apollo […]
A few years back, Adobe and Google teamed up to launch a new open-source font for Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) languages. Today, the two companies are expanding on this project with the launch of a serif CJK font. Adobe calls this new font Source Han Serif, while Google calls it Noto Serif CJK. Just like […]
The number of things that can be done from the comfort of one’s own bed has increased in recent years — shopping, banking and now geospatial analytics. Ok, it doesn’t sound sexy but it might give you a leg up the next time your friend starts an arcane argument with you over whose neighborhood historically […]
Google has reintroduced its Translate mobile apps to China, where they can now be accessed and used without the need for software to bypass local censorship. The U.S. tech giant left China more than seven years ago when it redirected its local search engine to Hong Kong and many of its services are censored in the country. Today’s low-key […]
Google’s self-driving car unit, Waymo, pursued arbitration against one of its star engineers last fall before filing a lawsuit in February against his current employer, Uber, for theft of trade secrets. Waymo claims that its former employee Anthony Levandowski stole 14,000 confidential documents before leaving to start the self-driving truck company Otto, which was acquired by […]
Google this morning announced a redesign for its iOS and Android search application, as well as its Google.com site on the mobile web, which now includes tappable shortcuts to areas like sports, weather, food and drink, entertainment and other interests. The idea here is to give users a different way to explore Google, instead of requiring the […]
Google is pulling display ads from being placed alongside a wider range of content on YouTube and other sites, in the wake of a spike of criticism that its automatic, programmatic advertising seemingly cannot stop mainstream brands from appearing alongside extremist and offensive material. Last week a number of brands and publishers in Europe said they would pull advertising from […]
After concerns that its Restricted Mode hides videos with LGBT content, YouTube stated that it “regrets any confusion.” In a tweet on its YouTube Creators account, the company said: “We are so proud to represent LGBTQ+ voices on our platform—they’re a key part of what YouTube is all about. The intention of Restricted Mode is to […]
The UK’s data protection watchdog has said it’s “close” to concluding a 10-month+ investigation into consent complaints pertaining to a patient data-sharing agreement inked between Google-owned DeepMind and the Royal Free NHS Trust which operates three hospitals in London. The ICO began its probe in May last year — after details emerged, via a FOI request made by New Scientist, of […]
You know when you set up a website and you add a Google Analytics tracker to see how many visitors you have? What you’re actually doing is giving Google and other parties access to your stats and users. Sure there are privacy protections in place and things aren’t all that bad but what if your […]