Tag Archives: TechCrunch

Google has suspended the Trump 2020 campaign app from the Google Play Store for policy violations, the company confirmed, following a report from Android Police which noted the app was unable to load any content and appeared to have been taken down. Both the Android version of the app and its iOS counterpart have been left online since the November 2020 elections, but hadn’t received recent updates — which likely contributed to the app’s stability issues. The Play Store version… Source link

Google today introduced a suite of updates for its online education tools whose adoption and further development have been accelerated by the pandemic, including Google Classroom, Google Meet and the next generation of G Suite for Education, now rebranded as Google Workspace for Education. In total, Google is promising more than 50 new features across its education products, with a focus on meeting educators’ and admins’ needs, in particular, in addition to those of the… Source link

Drivers throughout the United States will now have the option to pay for street parking right from Google Maps as part of an expanded partnership with transportation software companies Passport and ParkMobile. Google also announced it was extending this contactless payment feature to public transit users. Google Maps’ pay for parking feature will expand first via Android to more than 400 U.S. cities, including Boston, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, New York and… Source link

Databricks and Google Cloud today announced a new partnership that will bring to Databricks customers a deep integration with Google’s BigQuery platform and Google Kubernetes Engine. This will allow Databricks’ users to bring their data lakes and the service’s analytics capabilities to Google Cloud. Databricks already features a deep integration with Microsoft Azure — one that goes well beyond this new partnership with Google Cloud — and the company is also an AWS partner. By… Source link

Google has agreed to pay a €1.1 million fine over misleading star ratings for hotels in France. The tech giant had been applying its own (algorithmic) system of ratings for hotels applied via its search engine and on Google Maps. But back in 2019, following a number of complaints by hoteliers, the French national competition and consumer watchdog (DGCCRF) instigated an investigation into this propriety rating system. The probe revealed that the tech giant had replaced the standard… 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. The app industry is as hot as ever, with a record 218 billion downloads and $143 billion in global consumer spend in 2020. Consumers last year also spent 3.5 trillion minutes using apps on Android devices alone. And in the U.S., app usage surged ahead of the time spent watching live TV. Currently, the average American watches… Source link

You’ve landed on Human Capital, a weekly newsletter detailing the latest in diversity, equity, inclusion and labor. Sign up here to receive the newsletter every Friday at 1 p.m. PT. The events of this week perfectly encapsulate the variety of worker and workplace-related struggles happening in the tech industry. Google settled some discrimination allegations with the Department of Labor, Amazon agreed to settle a complaint with the FTC over stolen tips from Flex workers and the… Source link

Google has updated and broadened its Play Store policy on gaming loyalty programs to help developers better understand the practices that are permitted, months after confusion about the guidance prompted some backlash in India, the biggest Android market by users. The company said on Thursday that it now specifies guidance on gamified loyalty programs that are based on a qualified monetary transaction in an app and offer prizes of cash or other real-world cash equivalent perks. Scores… Source link

Google today announced a subtle but welcome refresh of its mobile search experience. The idea here is to provide easier to read search results and a more modern look with a simpler, edge-to-edge design. From what we’ve seen so far, this is not a radically different look, but the rounded and slightly shaded boxes around individual search results have been replaced with straight lines, for example, while in other places, Google has specifically added more roundness. You’ll find… Source link

Google’s plan to end support for third-party cookies in the Chrome browser and its Chromium engine is under investigation by the U.K.’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). The antitrust regulator said today that it’s launched a probe under Chapter II of the U.K.’s Competition Act 1998 into “suspected breaches of competition law by Google”. The move follows a complaint lodged in November by a coalition of digital marketing companies which urged the CMA to block… Source link