by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Emerging Businesses, Markets, Networking, Technology
San Francisco : Riding on Google’s growing ad business, Alphabet Inc posted $32.32 billion in revenue for the fourth quarter of 2017 — up 24 per cent (year-on-year) from $26.06 billion during the same quarter in 2016.
After deducting its traffic acquisition costs, Google’s revenue alone was $25.87 billion.
Overall, Alphabet posted revenues of $110.9 billion for 2017 — up 23 per cent year-on-year.
“Our full year operating income growth continues to underscore our core strength, and on top of this, we continue to make substantial investments for the long-term in exciting new businesses,” Ruth Porat, Chief Financial Officer of Alphabet, said in a statement late on Thursday.
Alphabet’s adjusted net income for the quarter was $6.84 billion — compared to $5.33 billion during the same quarter previous year.
Google’s Cloud business and its hardware revenue reached $4.69 billion, from $3.4 billion in Q4 of 2016.
Google’s Cloud business now generates over $1 billion per quarter, said CEO Sundar Pichai during the investors’ call.
“Google Cloud Platform is the fastest growing major Public Cloud provider in the world,” Pichai said.
Google Cloud Platform is behind Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft’s Azure in the Public Cloud market.
He also added that the company sold tens of millions of Chromecast and Google Home devices in 2017.
According to media reports, Google, however, missed profit expectations, reporting $9.70 per share. Analysts had expected $9.96 per share.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Branding, Markets, Networking, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : Google removed over seven lakh malicious apps from Play Store in 2017 that violated its policies – 70 per cent more than the apps it took down in 2016 — the company said on Wednesday.
“Not only did we remove more bad apps, we were able to identify and take action against them earlier,” Andrew Ahn, Product Manager, Google Play, said in a blog post.
In fact, 99 per cent of apps with abusive contents were identified and rejected before anyone could install them, he added.
Google has developed new detection models and techniques that can identify repeat offenders and abusive developer networks at scale.
Google also took down 100,000 bad developers in 2017.
“This was possible through significant improvements in our ability to detect abuse — such as impersonation, inappropriate content, or malware — through new Machine Learning models and techniques,” the post read.
“Copycats” apps attempt to deceive users by impersonating famous apps.
They do this by trying to sneak in impersonating apps to the Play Store through deceptive methods such as using confusable unicode characters or hiding impersonating app icons in a different locale.
“In 2017, we took down more than a quarter of a million of impersonating apps,” Google said.
When it came to inappropriate content such as pornography, extreme violence, hate and illegal activities, Google’s improved machine learning models sifted through massive amounts of incoming app submissions and flagged them for potential violations.
“Tens of thousands of apps with inappropriate content were taken down last year as a result of such improved detection methods,” the company noted.
Potentially Harmful Applications (PHAs) are a type of malware that can harm people or their devices – like apps that conduct SMS fraud, act as trojans or phishing user’s information.
“With the launch of Google Play Protect in 2017, the annual PHA installs rates on Google Play was reduced by 50 per cent year over year,” the post said.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Networking, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : Despite the growth of sophisticated cyber threats globally, Google has said that less than 10 per cent of active Gmail users have enabled two-factor authentication making the remaining 90 per cent more vulnerable to cyber attacks.
According to Google engineers, compromised passwords are the top way hackers gain access to accounts and all users — especially those in the enterprises — should implement two-factor authentication immediately.
“Further, only 12 per cent of Americans use a password manager to protect their accounts,” US-based news website Techrepublic quoted Google engineer Grzegorz Milka as saying in a presentation at the Usenix Enigma 2018 security conference in California late on Saturday.
Two-factor authentication is one of the most effective ways to protect online accounts given that compromised passwords are the top way attackers gain access to accounts.
In the enterprise, if a hacker can break into the email of even one employee, it gives them not only access to company data but also ammunition for future phishing attacks — making it even more important for firms to ensure all employees have enabled two-factor authentication and gone through cybersecurity training.
The feature, which Google calls 2-step verification, requires using a second step-often a single-use key or password-along with the account password to verify a user’s identity and allow them into their account.
With Google, the second step can come in the form of a text message, a phone popup, through a Google Authenticator app or from a number of printed single-use codes.
Google first rolled out its two-factor authentication feature back in 2011, yet users have failed to adopt the safety measure in large numbers. The feature adds a few seconds to the login time but is claimed to be the best option to stay away from cyber attacks.
Milka said that Google did not make two-factor authentication mandatory for all users due to usability.
“It’s about how many people would we drive out if we force them to use additional security,” he was quoted as saying.
Google has made a number of other efforts to improve security for its users.
In January 2017, the company announced new layers of enterprise-grade security controls for “G Suite” to give users more control and visibility over sensitive information.
In October last year, it rolled out the “Advanced Protection Programme” that offers better defenses against phishing, accidental data sharing and fraudulent account access for executives and professionals in fields where confidential information is shared online.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Large Enterprise, Markets, Technology
New Delhi : Google has launched “Cloud AutoML”, a product that enables businesses with limited Machine Learning (ML) expertise to build high quality, custom Artificial Intelligence (AI) models to improve their product or service.
“Cloud AutoML” will let businesses and developers train custom vision models for their own use cases.
“At Google Cloud, our goal has been to lower the barrier of entry and make AI available to the largest possible community of developers, researchers, and businesses. Our Google Cloud AI team has been making good progress towards this goal,” Jia Li, Head of R&D, Cloud AI and ML, said in a statement late on Wednesday.
Businesses with limited ML expertise can leverage “Cloud AutoML” to start building their own high-quality custom models by leveraging advanced techniques like learning2learn and transfer learning from Google.
Google’s first “Cloud AutoML” release is “Cloud AutoML Vision”, a service that makes it faster and easier to create custom ML models for image recognition.
Its drag and drop interface lets users easily upload images, train and manage models, and then deploy those trained models directly on Google Cloud.
“AutoML Vision” provides a simple graphical user interface that lets businesses specify data, then turns that data into a high-quality model customised for specific needs.
“‘AutoML Vision’ is the result of our close collaboration with the Google Brain and other Google AI teams, and is the first of several Cloud AutoML products in development that aims to make it easier for more businesses to adopt ML,” Li said.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate Jobs, Employment, Markets, Technology
New Delhi : Google and US-based online education company Coursera on Wednesday launched Google IT Support Professional Certificate programme that will help create entry-level IT support jobs globally, including in India.
The industry-relevant curriculum will allow learners to share their information with companies looking to hire entry-level support professionals, including Bank of America, Walmart, Sprint, GE Digital, PNC Bank, Infosys, TEKSystems, UPMC, and Google.
The programme will help anyone with no prior experience to be ready for an entry-level IT support job in eight to 12 months.
“We developed this curriculum to address this problem head on. We are looking forward to working with Coursera, our nonprofit grantees and participating corporations to create opportunities for thousands of learners,” said Ben Fried, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Google.
Learners in the Google IT Support Professional Certificate will have access to courses designed and taught by Googlers, hands-on labs and widgets and intrapersonal “soft skills” guidance.
“Our collaboration with Google and top employers is designed to provide anyone, regardless of their prior experience or training, with the resources they need to succeed as IT professionals,” Raghav Gupta, India Country Director, Coursera, said in a statement.
Since its launch in 2012, Coursera has grown to 30 million registered learners who can choose among 2,400 courses, 236 specialisations and four master’s degrees.
—IANS
