Google

The keynote at Google’s big developer conference is over, and in its three hours(!) we found out about AndroidTV, Android Auto, and the next big release of Android for you phone. But there was also a ton of rumored stuff that Google didn’t announce. Here’s what was missing, and our best guesses at why. Coming Continue Reading →

We’ve been told that an Internet of Things (IoT) is coming, and our salt shakers will soon be speaking to our light bulbs. But how? There’s no decided way for all of these devices to talk to one another. That was, until this week, when Nest, the smart thermostat company owned by Google, opened its Continue Reading →

The day after Google gave its developers a vision for the immediate future, Regina Dugan and the ATAP team — “a small band of pirates trying to do cool sh*t,” as she calls them — have taken the stage to talk about a few slightly more ambitious things. One is Project Tango, the tablets and Continue Reading →

Last November, Google launched Google Play for Education, a portal for teachers and schools to more easily buy Android apps, books and educational YouTube video, and distribute them to their students. At the time, the program was solely focused on tablets, but starting Thursday, the team also launched support for Chromebooks. With the revamped Google Continue Reading →

Amidst Google’s numerous announcements at its I/O developer conference, it was Google’s low-budget but practical take on virtual reality that was perhaps the most notable device, for me at least. Facebook may have dropped $2 billion to buy VR device maker Oculus, but, for Google, using cardboard and an Android device is enough. That comparison Continue Reading →

It happened with the PC: Apple built one first, but Microsoft operating systems became the dominant way people computed. It happened with the smartphone: Apple’s iPhone defined the category, but around the world far more phones run Google’s Android. On Wednesday, Google launched a new Android platform for watches that it hopes will change history Continue Reading →

We were expecting an Android-news heavy show at this year’s Google I/O, and boy did we get one. More than anything else, today’s keynote demonstrated Google’s ambition to take its mobile OS basically everywhere: to your car, to your body, to your television, to your laptop, even into your workplace. We saw a preview of Continue Reading →

Google wants to take some of the stress out of working with Microsoft Office files in the Google Drive app suite. At Wednesday’s Google I/O keynote, the company announced native editing for Office documents, right from your mobile device or Google Drive. It’s actually pretty simple: open a Microsoft Word document on your Android device, Continue Reading →

Google made a big contribution to the big data world 10 years ago, when it released a paper on MapReduce, a programming model for doing big computing jobs on hefty data sets. But it turns out that, all this time, Google has been working on something far more advanced. At Google’s annual I/O shindig on Continue Reading →

Google sees an opportunity with fitness and, like Apple before it, the company is building a service to help the growing list of wearable devices talk to one another. Dubbed Google Fit, Google said its new platform will help users keep track of their fitness goals across various platforms and wearables. “Fit takes away the Continue Reading →