Google

You’re sitting in your living room. All you want to do is watch some Game Of Thrones on your day off… but your Chromecast refuses to respond. All it will do is play Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up… over… and over again. It might be this little box’s fault. Built by security analyst Continue Reading →

Google and Samsung are reportedly at odds once again. According to The Information, Google CEO Larry Page is unhappy that Samsung is pushing Tizen as its chosen smartwatch platform. Apparently joining LG in the retail launch of Android Wear wasn’t enough to satisfy Page. The report describes a “tense private meeting” between Google’s leader and Continue Reading →

After years of complaints, Google has finally dropped the real-name restrictions on its Google+ network. The company apologized for the “unnecessarily difficult experiences” the rules had created. When Google+ first launched, Google required that users sign up with their real identities. Over time, those restrictions were lessened, first for Pages and then for YouTube users. Continue Reading →

Google Wallet’s latest update includes several new features, including a way to easily harass your friends to pay you back. You can bug your friends (by sending what Google calls a “friendly nudge” but what most people will call a “UGH I KNOW”) to pay you back for that beer money they owe you via Continue Reading →

Google has Nest, Apple has HomeKit and Samsung has…SmartThings, we’re hearing. The deal was completed for around $200 million dollars, though it might have been less according to one source. (Update: The deal is not done yet, says another.) SmartThings is in the home automation space, and allows you to connect devices like lights and Continue Reading →

Google announced on Tuesday that it is launching Project Zero, an internal team of security specialists tasked with finding vulnerabilities in third-party software — not to exploit them, but to alert the developers and avoid the next Heartbleed. The Heartbleed bug put the whole software industry on heightened alert, and Google, Facebook, Microsoft and many Continue Reading →

Samsung, ARM, Nest and four other companies have gotten together to build a new radio standard for the smart home. Dubbed Thread, it is a low-power, mesh network protocol that also supports IPv6. The standard is built on the existing radio hardware used by ZigBee devices (802.15.4), which means that a company could update its Continue Reading →

With Glass and Android Wear, Google has already invested a lot of time and resources into developing the next-generation of wearables, but it’s another of its eye-focused projects that has on Tuesday received its first major boost. The search giant’s secret Google[x] team has confirmed that it’s licensed its smart eyewear to healthcare specialist Novartis, Continue Reading →

Google is on track for mobile search queries to overtake those on desktop this year, and on Tuesday it took one more step forward in how it is will control that experience on behalf of its users — for better or for worse. The company has announced that it will now flag to its users Continue Reading →

We’re entering a new age of artificial intelligence. Drawing on the work of a clever cadre of academic researchers, the biggest names in tech—including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple—are embracing a more powerful form of AI known as “deep learning,” using it to improve everything from speech recognition and language translation to computer vision, the Continue Reading →