Google News

Europe has greenlit Google’s $2.1BN acquisition of fitness wearable maker Fitbit, applying a number of conditions intended to shrink competition concerns over letting it gobble a major cache of health and wellness data following months of regulatory scrutiny of the deal. While Google announced its plan to buy Fitbit over a year ago, it only notified the transaction to the Commission on June 15, 2020 — meaning it’s taken half a year to be given a caveated go-ahead by Europe. It is… Source link

If you’ve ever used a Snapchat or Instagram filter, you know that one of the popular use cases for AR (augmented reality) is to change up your appearance with virtual makeup — like a different shade of lipstick or eyeshadow, for example. Today, Google is moving into this space, as well, with the launch of an AR-powered cosmetics try-on experience on Google Search. The company is working in partnership with top brands like L’Oréal, Estée Lauder, MAC Cosmetics, Black Opal and… Source link

European Union antitrust officials approved Google’s $2.1 billion acquisition of health tracker Fitbit Inc., FIT 0.21% but will enforce conditions on the deal aimed at protecting users’ health data and preserving competition in the wearable-tech sector. The European Commission, the EU’s top antitrust regulator, said Thursday that it has accepted a sweetened package of concessions from Google,… Source link

Google on Wednesday unveiled plans to install its first backup battery at a data center, with ambitions to use the project as a test case for grid service applications. The 3-megawatt, 2-hour-duration battery will be installed at a Google data center in Belgium, a location selected because its market has policies that allow batteries to provide frequency regulation to the grid. Google is already experimenting with load-shifting on a pilot scale. Google has matched its overall… Source link

Google’s acquisition of Fitbit is nearing completion now that the European Commission has approved the search giant’s $2.1 billion takeover of the wearable tech company. When Google announced the acquisition in November 2019, Google hardware chief Rick Osterloh said that the Fitbit purchase was “an opportunity to invest even more in Wear OS as well as introduce Made by Google wearable devices into the market.” But regulators quickly got involved, and in August, they formally

Google’s UK-based artificial intelligence unit DeepMind lost half a billion pounds last year, a similar figure to 2018, and its parent company Alphabet wrote off a further £1.1bn in debt, according to its latest accounts. The figures underline the huge investment that Google continues to make in the London-based AI team that it acquired in 2014 for about £400m, with the most talented machine-learning researchers able to command huge salaries. DeepMind’s revenues,… Source link

Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. On Wednesday, members of the company’s prominent Ethical AI research team wrote a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai asking that ousted researcher Timnit Gebru be rehired. Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP hide caption … Source link

GlobeNewswire Global Behavioral Biometrics Market By Component, By Application, By Type, By Deployment Type, By End User, By Region, Industry Analysis and Forecast, 2020 – 2026 The Global Behavioral Biometrics Market size is expected to reach $3. 4 billion by 2026, rising at a market growth of 23. 4% CAGR during the forecast period. Behavioral biometrics solution is beneficial for the purpose of identification of users by examining their activities like signature verification, keystroke… Source link

There are over 600 million internet users in India, but only a fraction of this population is fluent in English. Most online services and much of the content on the web currently, however, are available exclusively in English. This language barrier continues to contribute to a digital divide in the world’s second largest internet market that has limited hundreds of millions of users’ rendition of the world wide web to a select few websites and services. So it comes as no surprise that… Source link