Tag Archives: TechCrunch

Google has launched a website for its Read Along app for encouraging young children to practice reading. The website, which is introduced as a public beta, works with Chrome, Firefox, and Edge browsers on Desktop and Android, with support for iOS and more browsers such as Safari coming soon. The concept of the website is similar to the app: children can learn to speak languages like English, Portuguese, Spanish, Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, and… Source link

Google is suing Sonos (again) over patent infringement in what seems to be an unending legal fight series between two tech companies. The two new lawsuits filed Monday center around various patents involving keyword detection, charging using “technologies invented by Google” and determining what speaker from a group should respond to the keyword. A post from Bloomberg Law noted that both these lawsuits were filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern… Source link

Back in 2019, Google proudly announced they had achieved what quantum computing researchers had sought for years: proof that the esoteric technique could outperform traditional ones. But this demonstration of “quantum supremacy” is being challenged by researchers claiming to have pulled ahead of Google on a relatively normal supercomputer. To be clear, no one is saying Google lied or misrepresented its work — the painstaking and groundbreaking research that led to the quantum… Source link

The number of emoji subscription purchases on the South Korean messaging app KakaoTalk has dropped by a third over the year, parent firm Kakao said in quarterly earnings call Thursday, blaming Google’s new in-app payment policy, which forces apps to use Android-maker’s own billing system. KakaoTalk’s Emoticon Plus subscription service, which costs approximately $3.8 per month, allows users to access unlimited emojis. TechCrunch reported in June that South… Source link

Google today announced that it is adding a new movie editor and a few new video editing features to Google Photos, but for now these new features will only be available in the Android app running on Chromebooks. No word on when these features are coming to other platforms or why Google decided to go this way. It’s worth noting that you could obviously already manipulate single videos in Google Photos before, using what is essentially the same set of editing tools as for photos. More… Source link

Google is relaunching Street View, the Google Maps feature that allows users to explore an area through 360-degree panoramic street-level images, in India roughly six years after the South Asian nation rejected the feature over national security concerns. The company, which has been attempting to launch Street View in the country for over 10 years, said it has partnered with local giants Genesys and Tech Mahindra to relaunch the service, which is now live in 10 Indian cities. The… Source link

Google announced today that it’s updating some of its apps to work better on tablets. Google introduced Android 12L earlier this year to make tablets easier to use, and at I/O, the company announced plans to update more than 20 Google apps on tablets to optimize them for larger screens. Today, Google said it’s adding several new features for Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Keep to get started on this promise. The most notable feature announced today is the… Source link

Hey, friends! It’s that time again. Another week has passed us by, which means another issue of Week in Review — the newsletter where we recap the top stories to hit TechCrunch’s front page in the past seven days. Sign up here! The top story this week was about a new set of documents detailing how (and how often) the Department of Homeland Security taps third-party data brokers to obtain potentially sensitive location info while “sidestepping the legal process government… Source link

Google said today it’s reinstating the app permissions list on the Play Store after initially removing them in place of Data Safety labels that rolled out earlier this month. However, the company didn’t specify when the permission section will be back on the Play Store. Google launched the Data Safety labels on Play Store in April after announcing them last year. Apple, on the other hand, launched its own data privacy labels in 2020 showing what data an app can… Source link

Google has announced they will be taking a two-week hiring freeze, according to an article published by The Information earlier today.  This comes after the company announced last week they would be slowing down their hiring process for the remainder of the year to take a fresh look at their overall hiring process. The company has reportedly hired close to 10,000 people in Q2 alone, with full-quarter results set to drop on July 26.  “We’ll use this time to… Source link