by admin | May 25, 2021 | Investing, Markets, Technology
San Francisco : Google has been reluctant about sharing how much it spends on self-driving technology but now, the number — over $1 billion — has been accidentally revealed while reviewing documents in the ongoing legal tussle between Google’s Waymo and Uber.
Google spent a whopping $1.1 billion on developing its self-driving software and hardware, says the recent deposition of Shawn Bananzadeh, a financial analyst at Waymo which was first reported by IEEE Spectrum’s Mark Harris.
Bananzadeh was testifying in the ongoing Waymo’s lawsuit against Uber which claims the ride-hailing company stole intellectual property and trade secrets to develop its own autonomous technology.
According to reports, throughout Bananzadeh’s deposition, every dollar amount was redacted to protect Waymo’s confidential commercial information.
Waymo has patented a technology that will make its self-driving cars soft on the outside if it comes across a situation where there is a possibility of an accident with a human.
Self-driving vehicles constantly communicate with one another to prevent crashes but this is the first time that an industry player came out with a solution to save pedestrians from accident.
Last month, the legal tussle between ride-hailing company Uber and Google’s parent company Alphabet escalated when the court allowed Uber to seek deposition of Alphabet CEO Larry Page for up to four hours.
Waymo filed a lawsuit against Uber earlier in 2017, alleging that the stolen information became the technological basis for the company’s self-driving cars.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Marketing Basics, Markets, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : After a report revealing how Facebook allowed advertisers to reach “Jew haters” in its platform shook the conscience of a large number of its users, tech giants Google and Twitter have also been accused of letting advertisers use their platforms to reach racists.
Google, the world’s biggest advertising platform, allows advertisers to specifically target ads to people typing racist and bigoted terms into its search bar, BuzzFeed News reported on Friday.
Not only that, Google will suggest additional racist and bigoted terms once you type some into its ad-buying tool, it said.
“Type ‘Why do Jews ruin everything,’ and Google will suggest you run ads next to searches including ‘the evil jew’ and ‘jewish control of banks’, the report said.
Soon after, The Daily Beast reported that Twitter too lets advertisers target users interested in hateful words and phrases, including “wetback,” and “Nazi.”
These reports follow a ProPublica investigation that revealed this week how Facebook enabled advertisers to direct their pitches to the news feeds of people who expressed interest in the topics of “Jew hater,” “How to burn jews,” or, “History of ‘why jews ruin the world”.
Buzzfeed also purchased ads and ran a live campaign before alerting Google, which promptly disabled a number of the keywords involved.
“Our goal is to prevent our keyword suggestions tool from making offensive suggestions, and to stop any offensive ads appearing,” The Verge quoted Sridhar Ramaswamy, Google’s Senior Vice President of Ads & Commerce, as saying.
“We have language that informs advertisers when their ads are offensive and therefore rejected. In this instance, ads didn’t run against the vast majority of these keywords, but we didn’t catch all these offensive suggestions. That’s not good enough and we’re not making excuses. We’ve already turned off these suggestions, and any ads that made it through, and will work harder to stop this from happening again,” Ramaswamy said.
Reacting to The Daily Beast report, Twitter said that it actively prohibits and prevents any offensive ads from appearing on our platform.
“We are committed to understanding why this happened and how to keep it from happening again,” Twitter told The Verge in a statement.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Networking, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : Google is testing video reviews with its “Local Guides” programme that would allow users (who are part of the programme) to shoot 10-second videos right from Maps or upload 30-second video clips from their camera.
To upload video reviews to Maps, the user has to look for and select a place in Maps, scroll down and select “add a photo,” tap the “camera” icon and then hold the shutter to record or upload a short video, TechCrunch reported late on Thursday.
This feature is available on Android devices only for now.
The company introduced this feature to the “Local Guides” about two weeks ago.
Google is now notifying users about it via email and will likely release it for public in the near future,
Previously, users could attach only photographs to locations on Google Maps and there was no option to add videos.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Online Marketing, Technology
New Delhi : Joining the digital payment bandwagon in India and eclipsing WhatsApp’s plans, Google is launching a Unified Payments Interface (UPI)-based digital payment service called “Tez” on September 18.
According to The-Ken.com, on September 18, “Google, Alphabet Inc’s subsidiary, will make an entry into India’s fast growing and super-competitive digital payment ecosystem”.
After the story appeared in the media, Google India sent out an invite for an event in New Delhi on a September 18.
“As we continue to make strides in ensuring that our products continue to serve the needs of everyone, we invite you to a press conference to share details on the launch of a new product developed grounds up for India,” the invite read.
This confirms that a Make in India product will be unveiled at the event addressed by Caesar Sengupta, Vice President, Next Billion Users, Google.
“Tez” (meaning fast in Hindi) may work like Android Pay.
UPI is a payment system launched by the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and regulated by the Reserve Bank of India which facilitates the instant fund transfer between two bank accounts on the mobile platform.
The other big player to join India’s growing digital payment market is Facebook-owned WhatsApp.
WhatsApp has been in the news for working towards a UPI-based interface on its platform.
According to media reports, the leading messaging platform is already in talks with the NPCI and a few banks to facilitate financial transactions via UPI.
According to the blog website “WABetaInfo”, WhatsApp is giving shape to its plans towards bank-to-bank transfer using the UPI system.
Some mobile messaging platforms like WeChat and Hike Messenger already support UPI-based payment services.
The infrastructure of digital payments in India is expected to increase three-fold by the end of 2017 with almost five million electronic point of sale (PoS) machines, the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) has said.
“We expect that by December, the number will actually go up to five million PoS, which means that the infrastructure for digital payments is going to grow three times in the short span of one year,” MeitY Secretary Aruna Sundararajan said.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Branding, Business, Finding Customers, Large Enterprise, Markets, Technology
Beijing/San Francisco : Google is reportedly considering to acquire the struggling Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC’s phone business, media reported.
According to a report in the Chinese publication Commercial Times, Google is considering two options to seal the deal with HTC that is reportedly building Google’s “Pixel 2” line of smartphones.
Google is reportedly planning to “either become a strategic partner, or outright buy the entire smartphone unit”, phonearena.com reported on Friday citing Commercial Times.
However, HTC’s virtual reality business (HTC Vive) would not be part of the deal.
The news led to HTC posting its lowest revenue in over a decade on Thursday.
HTC, now in a bad financial health, was once very popular in the US but has not done well for quite some time even after launching flagship devices.
The Google Pixel and Pixel XL devices were also manufactured by HTC.
Both Google and HTC have declined to comment on the report.
If the deal materialises, it would be second such acquisition after Google’s $12.5 billion buyout of Motorola in 2012.
The search giant later sold it off to Lenovo for $2.91 billion in 2014.
In July, HTC unveiled its premium flagship smartphone HTC U11 in India at Rs 51,990 which is touted to have the highest-rated smartphone camera in the world.
—IANS
