by admin | May 25, 2021 | Investing, Markets, Social Media, Technology
San Francisco : Google will invest $13 billion in building new data centres and offices in over a dozen states in the US in 2019, the company’s CEO Sundar Pichai has said.
In a blog post late on Wednesday, Pichai said the investment would create tens of thousands of new jobs.
“Last year, we hired more than 10,000 people in the US and made over $9 billion in investments.
“We’re now announcing over $13 billion in investments throughout 2019 in data centres and offices across the US, with major expansions in 14 states,” Pichai wrote.
This would enable the creation of more than 10,000 new construction jobs in Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio, Texas, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Virginia.
Pichai said Google data centres make a significant economic contribution to local communities, as do the associated $5 billion in energy investments.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | C S R, Corporate, Entrepreneurship, Markets, Social Entrepreneur, Social Media, Success Stories, Technology

Sundar Pichai
San Francisco : Facing backlash from employees for its reported plan to enter China with a censored version of its search engine, Google CEO Sundar Pichai addressed them in an internal meeting and informed that the project, called Dragonfly, was at an exploratory stage, the media reported.
Pichai also addressed the controversy surrounding the secrecy of the project, BuzzFeed News reported late on Thursday.
“I think there are a lot of times when people are in exploratory stages where teams are debating and doing things, so sometimes being fully transparent at that stage can cause issues,” the Google CEO was quoted as saying.
The news about Google’s plan to build a censored search engine in China broke earlier this month when The Intercept reported that the search platform would blacklist “sensitive queries” about topics including politics, free speech, democracy, human rights and peaceful protest.
This triggered an outrage among some Google staff who complained of lack of transparency within the company.
Over 1,400 employees reportedly signed a petition demanding more insight into the project.
At the company meeting on Thursday, Pichai said that Google has been “very open about our desire to do more in China,” and that the team “has been in an exploration stage for quite a while now” and “exploring many options”, CNBC reported.
While expressing interest in continuing to expand the company’s services in China, Pichai told the employees that the company was “not close” to launching a search product there and that whether it would — or could — “is all very unclear”, the CNBC report said.
Google had earlier launched a search engine in China in 2006, but pulled the service out of the country in 2010, citing Chinese government efforts to limit free speech and block websites.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Social Media, Technology, World
Washington : Six US senators have written to Google CEO Sundar Pichai asking about the tech giant’s reported plan to create a censored Chinese version of its search engine.
“What has changed since 2010 to make Google comfortable cooperating with the rigorous censorship regime in China?” asked the senators, including Florida Republican Marco Rubio, Fortune reported on Sunday.
According to the letter, Google’s project is “deeply troubling and risks making Google complicit in human rights abuses” in China.
Google in 2010 “refused to comply with Chinese government censorship requirements on ethical grounds, and essentially abandoned the market,” said the report.
Media reports surfaced last week that Google is planning a censored search engine for China.
According to The Information, the company is also developing a news-aggregation app for use in China that will comply with the country’s censorship laws.
Google was yet to officially confirm or deny the search engine project.
The senators asked whether the agreement was “connected in any way with (Google’s) efforts to enter the Chinese market via the custom search app”.
The letter also asked “which ‘blacklist’ of censored searches and websites” Google would use in a Chinese search product.
The state-owned China Securities Daily, however, last week refuted the report that Google is building a search engine for China.
China is home to 772 million Internet users — the biggest online community in the world.
Google, which has hundreds of people working in China, has launched its Artificial Intelligence (AI) lab in the country.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Large Enterprise, Markets, Networking, Technology

Sundar Pichai
Shanghai : Hinting at a possible resumption of a harmonius relationship with China, Google’s India-born Chief Executive Sundar Pichai on Sunday said that a lot of the tech giant’s work actually helps Chinese companies.
Attending the fourth edition of the Chinese state-run “World Internet Conference” in Wuzhen, near Shanghai, Pichai said that many small and medium-sized businesses in China take advantage of Google to get their products to many other countries outside of China, the South China Morning Post reported.
The Google website and most of the company’s products — including YouTube — are banned in mainland China.
Google shut down its Chinese search engine seven years ago after a direct confrontation over Beijing’s censorship policies.
Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook and Cisco Systems CEO Chuck Robbins also attended the event.
The previous three conferences in 2014, 2015 and 2016 were not attended by such heavyweight US tech executives as Cook or Pichai.
Cook told the event that “the theme of this conference – developing a digital economy for openness and shared benefits – is a vision we at Apple share”.
He said that Apple “is proud to have worked alongside” many of its partners in China to help build a community that will join a common future in cyberspace.
Apple this year agreed to Chinese government requests to remove dozens of virtual private network (VPN) apps – services that allow Chinese users to access blocked websites – from its local App Store.
Skype, the calling app, was removed from its mainland App Store this autumn.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Markets, Technology

Google CEO Sundar Pichai
San Francisco : After an intense debate on the social media over the placement of cheese in Android’s and Apple’s burger emojis — which was joined by India-born Google CEO Sundar Pichai — the tech giant has finally served “Android burgers’ to its employees.
At its Seattle office, the workers were served “Android burgers” during Friday’s lunch, ending the debate that Android burger emoji is the winner when it comes to placing the cheese.
“The key difference between this burger and any other is that the slice of cheese is placed beneath the patty and atop the lower bun. It looks exactly like Android’s burger emoji, which sparked heated controversy earlier this week over the correct ingredient order of America’s beloved staple,” The Verge reported on Saturday.
The whole thing started when Thomas Baekdal, a writer and media analyst, tweeted early this week on the placement of cheese in Android and Apple burger emojis.
“I think we need to have a discussion about how Google’s burger emoji is placing the cheese underneath the burger, while Apple puts it on top,” Baekdal tweeted.
Reacting to this, Pichai tweeted, promising to “drop everything” and address the issue if people on the platform agree on what the correct placement of ingredient should be.
With serving “Android burgers,” it appears the kitchen department at Google has heard Pichai loud and clear.
The hamburger emoji, also known as the cheeseburger, was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010 and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015, according to Emojipedia — an emoji reference website.
—IANS