Jul 30th 2020 MOUNTAIN VIEW TO GET A good look at Google, climb a barren hill in front of the online giant’s Silicon Valley headquarters—or rather, both of them. To the right lies the old HQ, a clump of low-slung office buildings ringed by dozens of similar boxes. To the left a brand-new corporate centre is rising. From outside it resembles an oversized circus tent, but the inside is still undetermined: pillars, wooden panelling and hardly any walls. The bare-bones structure is meant to… Source link

Jul 30th 2020 IT MAY BE just 21 years old, but Google is in the midst of a mid-life crisis. As so often in such cases, all seems well on the surface. Every day its search engine handles 6bn requests, YouTube receives 49 years’ worth of video uploads and Gmail processes about 100bn emails. Thanks to its dominance of online advertising, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, made a profit of $34bn last year. Beyond its core operations, it is a world leader in artificial intelligence (AI),… Source link

Of the tech titans, which included the CEOs of Amazon (AMZN), Apple (AAPL), Facebook (FB) and Google (GOOGL), some fared better than others in the first hours of the hearing. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, acknowledged, albeit earnestly and transparently, that Amazon may have improperly used third-party seller data to inform its own product decisions — a key concern over the company’s approach to competition. Apple CEO Tim Cook, on the other hand, got off pretty lightly. Despite some early… Source link

Image copyright Getty Images/EPA/Reuters Image caption Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai defended their firms The heads of some of the… Source link

Stock futures were slightly higher Wednesday evening as market participants continued to digest the Federal Reserve’s latest monetary policy statement, which was largely viewed as dovish. Investors looked ahead to the first report on US second-quarter GDP Thursday morning, along with more data on weekly jobless claims and a slew of Big Tech earnings. Market participants are bracing for what is likely to be by far the worst quarterly GDP print on record, with second-quarter GDP expected to… Source link

Major League Baseball has laid down punishments after tempers flared between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Houston Astros on Tuesday night, the first bit of justice from MLB players we’ve seen carried out against the Astros after their cheating scandal rocked baseball this past offseason. Joe Kelly, who threw pitches near the heads of Alex Bregman and Carlos Correa and then taunted Correa, was suspended eight games. Dodgers manager Dave Roberts was suspended one game. Astros manager Dusty… Source link

Google’s Sundar Pichai faced an awkward line of enquiry during today’s House Antitrust Subcommittee hearing related to its 2007 acquisition of adtech platform DoubleClick, and how it went on to renege on an original promise to lawmakers and regulators that it would not (nor could not) merge DoubleClick data with Google account data — automagically doing just that almost a decade later. By linking internet users’ browsing data, as harvested via the DoubleClick cookie, to… Source link

ARLINGTON, Va., July 29, 2020 /PRNewswire/ — Two years ago, Google reached out to CommonLook because of our expertise in PDF accessibility. “At the time, we recognized the potential impact on PDF accessibility due to the massive number of Chrome users around the world.” – Monir ElRayes, President and CEO, CommonLook, Inc. Google knows that online content publishers are required to have their PDFs accessible and compliant to standards. Unfortunately, most organizations do not support directly… Source link

Google this week revealed it was unbinding Stadia from WiFi, meaning you can finally play your games on mobile devices via 4G or 5G cellular networks. It’s an upgrade Stadia’s been missing for a while, and could make the service more palatable to potential users — which Stadia could certainly use help recruiting. The option is currently available to users, though you have to opt into an “experiment,” meaning essentially a beta test. Once you do, you can… Source link

In the four months between the NHL pausing its season due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the resumption of the campaign this week, the world in no uncertain terms changed. The pandemic forced a new reality upon us, and the economic strife combined with increased awareness globally about how the police target and kill Black people with impunity led to a widespread call for change. It’s perhaps naive to expect the NHL to know better by now, despite establishing its Declaration of Principles and… Source link