Tag Archives: TechCrunch

Google alternative Ecosia is on a mission to turn search clicks into trees. The Berlin based not-for-profit reached a major milestone earlier this month, having used ad revenue generated by users of its privacy-sensitive search engine to plant more than 100 million trees across 25 countries worldwide — targeted at biodiversity hotspots. However these good feels have been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic. Ecosia has seen its monthly revenues slashed by half since COVID-19 arrived… 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

Google One, Google’s subscription program for buying additional storage and live support, is getting an update today that will bring free phone backups for Android and iOS devices to anybody who installs the app — even if they don’t have a paid membership. The catch: While the feature is free, the backups count against your free Google storage allowance of 15GB. If you need more you need — you guessed it — a Google One membership to buy more storage or delete data you no… Source link

Google today announced its plans to build a new subsea cable with landing points in New York in the U.S. and Bude, U.K. and Bilbao, Spain in Europe. The new cable, named after the pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper, will join Google’s various other private subsea cables like Curie between the U.S. and South America, Dunant between the U.S. and France and Equiano between Europe and Africa. The new cable is scheduled to go online in 2022 and will be built by SubCom, which… Source link

Google has long had a leg up on Amazon as far as smart screen video playback is concerned. YouTube is really the ideal service for these kinds of devices. Amazon, on the other hand, has a solid option for watching movies and TV on the Echo Show, in the form of its own Prime video service. The Nest line upped the ante late last year with the addition of Hulu, and today it adds the biggest premium streaming service to the mix. Starting this week, Google is rolling out support for Netflix… Source link

Google Maps is making it easier for bikeshare users to navigate their city with an update to Maps now rolling out across 10 major markets. Already, Google Maps could point users to bikesharing locations and it has long since offered cycling directions between any two points. The new update, however, will combine both walking and biking directions in order to provide end-to-end navigation between docked bikeshare locations. That is, Google Maps will first provide detailed walking… Source link

Many major websites and services were unreachable for a period Friday afternoon due to issues at Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 DNS service. The outage seems to have started at about 2:15 Pacific time and lasted for about 25 minutes before connections began to be restored. Google DNS may also have been affected. Update: Cloudflare at 2:46 says “the issue has been identified and a fix is being implemented.” CEO Matthew Prince explains that it all came down to a bad router in Atlanta: We… Source link

Google’s latest experiment is a video shopping platform designed to introduce consumers to new products in under 90 seconds. The company today is launching Shoploop, a project from Google’s internal R&D division, Area 120, where it tests out new ideas with a public user base. Shoploop’s founder, Lax Poojary, had previously worked on online trip planner, Touring Bird, also at Area 120. Last year, that effort became one of a small number of R&D projects to graduate and become a part… Source link

Reliance Jio continues to add billions of dollars to its bank account, Apple scores a tax victory in Europe and researchers test a system for undersea Wi-Fi (with lasers!). Here’s your Daily Crunch for July 15, 2020. Google invests $4.5 billion in India’s Reliance Jio Platforms Another giant tech company has invested in India’s largest telecom, following Facebook’s investment a couple of months ago. Reliance Jio has raised about $20.2 billion in the past four months — more… Source link

In a set of new lawsuits, two Illinois residents argue that three tech giants violated state laws prohibiting the use of personal biometric data without permission. Illinois residents Steven Vance and Tim Janecyk allege that images of their faces appeared in IBM’s “Diversity in Faces” database without their consent and were used to train facial recognition systems at Amazon, Microsoft and Google’s parent company Alphabet. While all three companies are based on the West Coast,… Source link