Tag Archives: TechCrunch

Google’s anticipated iOS 16 Lock Screen widgets have now begun to arrive. Alongside the launch of Apple’s new mobile operating system, iOS 16, the search giant last month had teased its plans to support the iPhone’s newest feature that allows users to place widgets directly on their phone’s lock screen, offering information and easy access to favorite apps. Google said it would soon release widgets for a number of its top apps including Search, Maps, Gmail and others. Google’s… Source link

Google is spinning up a new, online-only startup accelerator centered around the elusive circular economy. The effort is Google’s latest to help environmentally focused startups grow, while potentially hooking them on its cloud products in the process. In the broadest of strokes, the circular economy represents a colossal shift in how humanity makes and uses stuff. Instead of primarily harvesting raw materials to produce goods that wind up incinerated, or in… Source link

While the broader virtual reality industry earnestly waits for Meta’s next announcements around new VR products at its Connect event next week, Google’s venture arm GV is placing an interesting bet in a startup building up an ecosystem around some of Meta’s hardware. GV has led a $12 million Series A investment in SideQuest, the makers of an alternative app store for the Meta Quest VR headset, which allows developers to ship and market experimental games that may not initially… Source link

Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the weekly TechCrunch series that recaps the latest in mobile OS news, mobile applications and the overall app economy. Global app spending reached $65 billion in the first half of 2022, up only slightly from the $64.4 billion during the same period in 2021, as hypergrowth fueled by the pandemic has diminished. But overall, the app economy is continuing to grow, having produced a record number of downloads and consumer spending across both the iOS and… Source link

There’s a lot of chatter right now about the “surprise” shutdown of Stadia, Google’s game-streaming service. While it’s true that rivals like Geforce Now and Xbox Cloud Gaming presented entrenched competition, and that Google knows next to nothing about gaming, the main trouble — as with most of its products these days — is that no one trusted them to keep it alive longer than a year or two. It really is that simple: No one trusts Google. It has exhibited such poor… Source link

Google appears to have disabled access to Google Translate in parts of China, redirecting visitors to the Hong Kong domain — which isn’t accessible from the mainland. According to users on Reddit and site archives viewed by TechCrunch, Google swapped the Google Translate interface at translate.google.cn with a generic Google Search page at some point within the last 24 hours. The change is reportedly impacting the translation features of apps like KOReader, a… Source link

Google Colaboratory (Colab for short), Google’s service designed to allow anyone to write and execute arbitrary Python code through a web browser, is introducing a pay-as-a-you-go plan. In its first pricing change since Google launched premium Colab plans in 2020, Colab will now give users the option to purchase additional compute time in Colab with or without a paid subscription. Google says that the update won’t affect the free-of-charge Colab tier, which… Source link

Two and a half years after unveiling Stadia on stage at GDC, the game streaming service is officially done. Subscribers will have access to the games library through January 18 of next year, after which point, it will shut down for good. Google adds in a blog post that it expects to have all refunds for subscribers issued by around that time, as well. Google had not acknowledged previous struggles with the service. In a tweet dated late-July 2022, the company noted simply, “Stadia is… Source link

This spring, Google announced it would expand the types of personal information users could request to have removed from Google Search results to include contact information, like a phone number, address or email. At Google’s “Search On” event today, where the company unveiled a number of announcements related to its Search products and services, it said this feature would now be rolling out widely to users in the U.S. and would later expand to include alerts. Originally, Google

At a Google Search-focused event this morning, Google announced that it will soon introduce ways to translate news coverage directly from Search. Starting in 2023, English users, for example, will be able to search and see translated links to news results from Spanish-language publishers in countries such as Mexico, in addition to links to articles written in their preferred language. “Say you wanted to learn about how people in Mexico were impacted by the more… Source link