Category Archives: Google

HONG KONG, HONG KONG - November 27: A woman using an Macbook Pro as she uses Google G Suite on ... [+] November 27, 2017 in Hong Kong, Hong Kong. (Photo by studioEAST/Getty Images)

Here are five things in technology that happened this past week and how they affect your business. Did you miss them?

1 Google is capitalizing on coronavirus and giving businesses and schools G Suite enterprise features until July 1st.

Google announced this past week that they are going to be giving access to their advanced Hangouts Meet feature to all Education and G Suite customers up until the first of July this year. The extension will allow G Suite Education and G Suite Basic users to access Enterprise features such as permitting up to 250 individuals to take part in a call, capability to record and save meetings, and livestreaming content for thousands of viewers. (Source: Venture Beat)

Why this is important for your business:

Businesses and educational institutions are being impacted the most by the Coronavirus with many high-profile companiessuch as Twittertelling their workers to work remotely. Google shared thatwith the virus causing some major concerns they want to be help be a part of the solution in a small way by allowing businesses and educational institutions stay connected. Smart thinking. As the impact of Coronovirus spreads, more businesses are asking their employees to work from home (see below). So what better opportunity to take advantage G Suite and other cloud based tools?

2 As coronavirus worsens, companies renew focus on collaboration and remote work.

Due to the recent coronavirus outbreak, businesses all over the United States are working to find ways to maintain productivity while keeping their employees safe. Slack and Zoomboth major players in the workplace productivity space saw their stock prices rise over the last several weeks as businesses find ways to keep their employees health in check and to help individuals work remotely. According to recent data, 69% of businesses in the United States already allow employees to work from home, and the number may soon be more due to the outbreak. (Source: Computer World)

Why this is important for your business:

If theres anything good that comes from this latest health situation, its that many companies are being forced into implementing remote software toolsand I know that once they do theyll discover the benefits. Software makers like Slack and Zoom are seeing more interest and for good reason. Many other application providers from customer relationship management to accounting and project management are also encouraging their customers to get more employees using their tools from home.

3 These are the first passwords hackers will try when attacking your device.

According to F-Securea security company whose mission is to track and identify patterns among cyber security breachestheir decoy servers established all over the globe are helping find the passwords that are proving to be the most vulnerable when it comes to hackers. Recently released data has shown that passwords like admin, 12345, default, password, and root are the most easily hacked passwords that cyber attackers use. Guidelines outlined by the U.K government suggested that any device that is connected to the internet should have unique passwords and that those passwords should not be able to be reset to universal factory settings. (Source: ZDNet)

Why this is important for your business:

Really? Youre still using 12345 as your password? You know thats not right and you know that doing so makes your network and data more susceptible than ever. Make it a point to get these passwords changed. Use symbols, caps and lower case. Better yet use a phrase that no one will ever think of like The Phillies will win the 2020 World Series!Thats such an outlandish statement that I doubt any hacker (or Phillies fan) would even consider it.

4 Kabbage is taking aim at big banks with its small business cash flow tools.

Kabbage recently announced that they are going to be getting more involved in small business by launching their newest financial management tool called Kabbage Insights. Kabbage Insights will provide its customers a detailed picture of their cash flow instantaneously, allowing small business owners to be more effective and efficient when it comes to the choices they need to make when it comes to finances. The newest tool uses AI as one of the methods to help produce data to help small businesses see and understand their cash flow more quickly and accurately and at any time. (Source: Banking Dive)

Why this is important for your business:

Great to see Kabbage providing even more tools for its small business community that helps them increase their cash flow. This is exactly the kind of service a good financial services company should be providing: not just capital, but advice and tools for using capital in the best way possible. It benefits both parties on either side of financing transaction.

5 Microsoft Teams just added new Outlook integration, chat updates, and more.

Microsoft has announced that they have made some changes to their Teams platform in order to make processes more simplified and streamlined. One of the biggest moves is the way Teams and Outlook will be integrated moving forward, now allowing users to take an email from Outlook and immediately move it over into the chat feature in Teams in one click, and vice versa. Meetings and calls have been given improvements as well with the addition of live captions option to make it easier for individuals to know what is happening in meetings, regardless if the audio quality is poor or the room is too noisy. Leaders will now also be able to assign tags to individuals in an entire organization in order to more efficiently get messages across to larger groups of people in designated roles. (Source: ZDNet)

Why this is important for your business:

Microsoft (full disclosure: my company is a Microsoft partner) continues to add new features to its Teams application, which is the reason why the application is growing in popularity and giving the people at Slack such headaches. If your company is already using Office 365 it would be very worthwhile to bring a partner or trainer in to teach you the benefits of Microsoft Teams. You may already own it!

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Google Announces A Coronavirus Incentive For G SuiteAnd Other Small Business Tech News - Forbes

WhenJack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Square,announced he was going to live in Africa for a few months, it raised a few eyebrows on Wall Street.

Dorsey's potential move to Africa is one of the reasons why Paul Singer, billionaire investor and founder of Elliott Management,wants to remove Dorsey from his job as Twitter CEO.Dorsey now might reconsider his trip to Africa because of coronavirus concerns.

Tech companies have consistently looked to China and India not Africa for growth.

But that's beginning to change. Africa now has more than 600 active technology hubs, with facilities and support for tech and digital entrepreneurs. That's up from 442 in 2018. And its population is expected to explode to 4.3 billion by the year 2100, according to the United Nationsand the Pew Research Center.

And big tech companies such as Twitter, Google and Microsoft have begun to take notice. Watch the above video to see why Africa is well on its way to a technology boom.

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Why companies like Microsoft and Google are betting big on Africa - CNBC

SAN FRANCISCO Anthony Levandowski, a former star Google and Uber engineer who helped pioneer self-driving cars, filed for bankruptcy protection on Wednesday after a court ordered him to pay $179 million to Google over a contract dispute.

The damages stemmed from an arbitration case between Google and Mr. Levandowski. The engineer had for years worked on self-driving cars at Google before leaving to create an autonomous vehicle start-up in 2016 and then later joining the ride-hailing giant Uber.

An arbitration panel had ruled in December that Mr. Levandowski and another colleague, Lior Ron, had engaged in unfair and deceptive practices by secretly poaching away Google colleagues to join the start-up. On Wednesday, a San Francisco County court confirmed the arbitration panels decision that Mr. Levandowski pay $179 million to Google.

In his filing for bankruptcy protection, Mr. Levandowski said he had $50 million to $100 million in personal assets, which would not be enough to pay the damages to Google.

Uber declined to comment, as did Mr. Levandowskis lawyer. In a statement, Waymo, the self-driving car company that was spun out of Google, said, We will continue to take the necessary steps to ensure our confidential information is protected as we build the worlds most experienced driver.

The substantial damages and bankruptcy filing are another ignominious chapter for one of Silicon Valleys onetime brightest technologists.

Mr. Levandowski had been paid handsomely for his years of work at Google and had a close relationship with Larry Page, a founder and former chief executive of the search giant. But the relationship changed when Mr. Levandowski left Google and took some of the companys self-driving talent with him to found Otto, a self-driving truck start-up. Mr. Levandowski later sold Otto to Uber for more than $600 million.

His good fortune soon ran out. In 2017, Waymo the newly christened self-driving company spun out of Google sued Uber and Mr. Levandowski for theft of trade secrets, accusing the two of conspiring to steal years of autonomous vehicle research to bolster Ubers own self-driving program. Uber and Waymo eventually settled, with Uber handing Waymo roughly $245 million in Uber stock.

But it was not over for Mr. Levandowski.

Last August, federal prosecutors charged him with 33 counts of theft and attempted theft of trade secrets from Google, a case that is still open.

At the same time, Google pursued its own case against Mr. Levandowski for poaching employees, resulting in Wednesdays ruling.

Its unclear if Mr. Levandowski will have to pay, given that his employment agreement with Uber stated it indemnified him. In a securities filing this week, Uber left the question open.

While Uber and Levandowski are parties to an indemnification agreement, whether Uber is ultimately responsible for such indemnification is subject to a dispute between the company and Levandowski, Ubers filing said.

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Star Engineer Who Crossed Google Is Ordered to Pay $179 Million to Company - The New York Times

Google is starting to roll out 4K streaming support for Stadia on the web. 9to5Google reports that a number of Reddit users have spotted the new 4K support in games like Assassins Creed Odyssey, Mortal Kombat 11, and Grid. The option doesnt appear to be available for all Stadia users, though. Weve tested three Stadia accounts and none of them have the 4K option just yet.

If youre a Stadia user then you can check your connection quality and resolution by pressing shift + tab once a game is launched and selecting the connection section. A 4K label should appear if your connection and display supports the new streaming option.

Its not yet clear how Google will handle 4K streams over the web to devices with a 1080p or 1440p screens. If Google requires a 4K monitor and hasnt implemented downscaling for Stadia on the web then a lot of people will be left out of this new option. Well test this fully once the 4K option appears on our Stadia test accounts.

Google also appears to be readying new features for Stadia. A recent Stadia app hints at the highly anticipated free tier, YouTube streaming, family game sharing, and more.

Excerpt from:

Google Stadia now supports 4K streaming on the web - The Verge

If youve gotten used to ordering around John Legend (or his voice, at least) as your Google Assistant, be prepared for a loss: Google has announced that it will discontinue the celebrity cameo voice on March 23rd. Google added the singers voice to its roster of available Google Assistant voices at Google I/O last April. It previously noted that the feature would run for limited time, but the company never specified how long it would last. (Disclaimer: John Legend is a Vox Media board member.)

John Legends cameo came with its own set of personality-specific Easter eggs. Youll get him crooning if you ask him to sing you Happy Birthday or if you ask about Chrissy Teigen, his equally famous wife.

For now, if you really want a celebrity voice as your Google Assistant over the standard selections, Google will continue to offer comedian Issa Rae as an option. But dont fall in love because its likely that her voice get axed from Assistant sometime in the near future as well.

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Google will lose its John Legend Google Assistant voice on March 23rd - The Verge

The ongoing coronavirus outbreak has pushed more companies and organizations to transition to remote work, and now both Google and Microsoft have said they will grant access to their more robust teleconferencing and collaboration tools that are typically only available to enterprise customers to make it easier for people to work from home. Both companies are only offering free access for a limited time.

Google announced this morning that it would be rolling out free access to advanced features for Hangouts Meet to all G Suite and G Suite for Education customers globally through July 1st. That means organizations can host meetings with up to 250 participants, live stream to up to 100,000 viewers within a single domain, and record and save meetings to Google Drive. Normally, Google charges $13 extra per user per month for these features in addition to G Suite access under its enterprise tier, which adds up to a total of $25 per user per month.

Microsoft is offering a free six-month trial globally for a premium tier of Microsoft Teams, Business Insider first reported on Tuesday. The tier was originally designed to enable hospitals, schools, and businesses in China to get up and running quickly on Microsoft Teams, and that tier is now available globally. However, when you try to sign up for it, youll be prompted to work with a Microsoft partner or a member of Microsofts sales team to get it set up.

On March 10th, Microsoft says it will also roll out an update to the free version of Teams that will lift restrictions on how many users can be part of a team and allow users to schedule video calls and conferences.

Both Google and Microsoft have also responded to COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, by canceling conferences taking place in April and May. Google has also halted most international travel for employees, and Microsoft has recommended that employees work remotely to help prevent the spread of the disease.

Update, March 3rd, 7:41PM ET: Weve clarified Microsofts offerings after conversations with a Microsoft spokesperson.

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Google and Microsoft are giving away enterprise conferencing tools due to coronavirus - The Verge

Customers look at the Apple's new iPhone 11 series smartphones in an Apple retail store on East Nanjing Road in Shanghai.

Alex Ta | SOPA Images | LightRocket | Getty Images

With the U.S.-China trade war last year and the outbreak of the new coronavirus, American technology firms Apple, Microsoft and Google have reportedly looked to move more production of their hardware products out of the world's second-largest economy.

But reducing reliance on China won't be easy.

"China manufacturing is far more embedded into American supply chains than ever before,"Sean Maharaj, managing director at AArete, a global management consultancy.

Google and Microsoft are accelerating their efforts to shift production of hardware to other parts of Asia, the Nikkei Asian Review reported last week.

The problem for all these countries is that moving supply chains quickly will be a tough task and China will still have to play a major role. That might mean mitigating risk is a lot harder.

The Nikkei, citing people with direct knowledge of the matter, said Google is set to begin production of an upcoming low-cost smartphone, rumored to be called the Pixel 4a, in Vietnam as soon as April. The upcoming flagship smartphone will also be manufactured there in the second half of the year, according to the report.

Google has also asked a manufacturing partner in Thailand to prepare production lines for its so-called smart home products, such as voice assistant-enabled speakers, Nikkei said.Meanwhile, Microsoft is hoping to start production in Vietnam in the second quarter for its Surface line of notebooks and desktop PCs, it added.

Both of these companies' hardware has been mainly produced in China until now. Microsoft declined to comment while Google did not respond to two requests for information when contacted by CNBC.

Last year, Apple was reportedly looking to start a trial for the production of its AirPods in Vietnam and asked suppliers to look into moving 15% to 30% of production from China to other parts of South East Asia.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment when contacted by CNBC.

To understand why, it's important to break down the manufacturing process.P.S. Subramaniam, partner in the strategic operations practice of Kearney, explains there are electronic components like displays and memory, modules such as cameras, and the assembly of the finished goods.

Around 40% of finished goods come from China globally today and there is capacity in other areas of the world,Subramaniam said. So it's "easier (to) diversify away from China in the short term (3-6 months) for most companies which have well developed product and assembly process documentation," he added.

Meanwhile, around 60% of modules are made in China. That's harder to move away "but still feasible",Subramaniam said.

Shifting manufacturing locations helps diversify risk but isn't a cure-all, and in fact could become a game of whack-a-mole.

Bryan Ma

VP of devices research at IDC

The components part is a bigger issue.

"This is a singular choke point as components are a necessary ingredient in modules and finished goods assemblies. This is very hard to move as it requires entire ecosystems,Subramaniam told CNBC.

Moving component manufacturing outside of China will also be difficult given how entrenched it is and how long it would take to build capacity in another country.

"Some assembly could be moved elsewhere, but these production lines take time to set up, and moreover no other country has the supply of labor as China,"John Harmon, senior analyst at Coresight Research, told CNBC.

On top of that, suppliers for components that companies rely on will have their manufacturing in China. That could make any move for an American technology firm to diversify a much longer process.

"Other suppliers Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese or Korean which have set up facilities around these manufacturing plants in China will have to also diversify, which would make this switch a little bit less quick," Neil Shah, a partner at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.

AArete's Maharaj said that diversifying supply chains away from China can happen, though it will be slow.

"This is like turning an aircraft around slowly," he told CNBC."I think many companies have been seriously exploring supply chain risk mitigation strategies."

"When corporations want to move quickly and make investments, they can. And, they work closely with local governments and businesses to make it happen," Maharaj said. "Given the above momentum i.e. South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam etc. this could all play out more quickly than we had initially expected."

Ultimately though, moving some production out of China may not be something that reduces risk for companies significantly.

"Shifting manufacturing locations helps diversify risk but isn't a cure-all, and in fact could become a game of whack-a-mole," Bryan Ma, vice president of devices research at IDC, told CNBC. "The coronavirus has already spread to other countries, while trade war tariffs similarly could've targeted other countries over time."

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Apple, Microsoft, Google look to move production away from China. That's not going to be easy - CNBC

Google Cloud today announced a new solution for its telecom customers: Anthos for Telecom. You can think of this as a specialized edition of Googles container-based Anthos multi-cloud platform for both modernizing existing applications and building new ones on top of Kubernetes. The announcement, which was originally slated for MWC, doesnt come as a major surprise, given Google Clouds focus on offering very targeted services to its enterprise customers in a number of different verticals.

Given the rise of edge computing and, in the telco business, 5G, Anthos for Telecom makes for an interesting play in what could potentially be a very lucrative market for Google. This is also the market where the open-source OpenStack project has remained the strongest.

Whats maybe even more important here is that Google is also launching a new service called the Global Mobile Edge Cloud (GMEC). With this, telco companies will be able to run their applications not just in Googles 20+ data center regions, but also in Googles more than 130 edge locations around the world.

Were basically giving you compute power on our edge, where previously it was only for Google use, through the Anthos platform, explained Eyal Manor, the VP of Engineering for Anthos. The edge is very powerful and I think we will now see substantially more innovation happening for applications that are latency-sensitive. Weve been investing in edge compute and edge networking for a long time in Google over the years for the internal services. And we think its a fairly unique capability now to open it up for third-party customers.

For now, Google is only making this available to its teleco partners, with AT&T being the launch customers, but over time, Manor said, itll likely open its edge cloud to other verticals, as well. Google also expects to be able to announce other partners in the near future.

As for Anthos for Telecom, Manor notes that this is very much what its customers are asking for, especially now that so many of their new applications are containerized.

[Anthos] brings the best of cloud-as-a-service to our customers, wherever they are, in multiple environments and provide the lock-in free environment with the latest cloud tools, explained Manor. The goal is really to empower developers and operators to move faster in a consistent way, so regardless of where you are, you dont have to train your technical staff. It works on-premise, it works on GCP and on other clouds. And thats what we hear from customers customers really like choice.

In the telecom industry, those customers also want to get higher up the stack and get consistency between their data centers and the edge and all of that, of course, is meant to bring down the cost of running these networks and services.

We dont want to manage the [technology] we previously invested in for many years because the upgrades were terribly expensive and slow for that. I hear that consistently. And please Google, make this seem like a service in the cloud for us, Manor said.

For developers, Anthos also promises to provide the same development experience, no matter where the application is deployed and Google now has an established network of partners that provides both solutions to developers as well as operators around Anthos. To this effect, Google is also launching new partnerships with the Amdocs customer experience platform and Netcracker today.

Were excited to unveil a new strategy today to help telecommunications companies innovate and accelerate their digital transformation through Google Cloud, said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, in todays announcement. By collaborating closely with leading telecoms, partners and customers, we can transform the industry together and create better overall experiences for our users globally.

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Google Cloud goes after the telco business with Anthos for Telecom and its Global Mobile Edge Cloud - TechCrunch

Google and parent company Alphabet Inc's (NASDAQ: GOOGL) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) exposure to the travel industry will likely impact total revenue as U.S. travel activity appears to have slowed down amid coronavirus concerns, according to Bank of America.

Justin Post maintains a Buy rating on Alphabet's stock with a $1,600 price target.

Google is the largest recipient of travel industry digital ad spend and the travel industry likely accounted for 11% of Google's total $134.5 billion gross advertising revenue, Post wrote in a note. This also implies the travel industry accounts for 9% of Google's total revenue.

Many government agencies and companies have either limited or banned travel activity and this will impact the travel sector in 2020, Post said. Prior to the coronavirus outbreak, Google's travel ad spend was likely growing at around 10% but travel revenue should fall to negative 6.7% in the first quarter and negative 10.2% in the second quarter.

The financial impact is modeled at $647 million in the first quarter and $820 million in the second quarter, or $1.5 billion for the first half of 2020. The research firm is modeling trends to improve after April and will remain under pressure through June. By July, spending activity should revert to normal.

As such, full-year 2020 revenue estimates were lowered from $190.059 billion to $188.561 billion.

Shares of Alphabet were trading lower by nearly 3% at $1,346.40.

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Google's Exposure To Travel Will Impact Revenue, BofA Says - Benzinga

Amazon Web Services plans to double its sales staffing numbers this year in the face of mounting competition and slowing growth.

The hiring spree, reportedly announced in a sales meeting in Chicago in January, will bring in security, AI, and data analytics specialists to help AWS's sales staff answer technical questions from customers and sell more services.

The exact size of AWS's sales team is a closely guarded secret, even to its own staff. The cloud biz's chief suit, Andy Jassy, has said the number was in the "thousands" in a 2016 interview, and it has likely grown considerably since then.

AWS dominates cloud computing, munching 32.3 per cent of the market, according to Canalys. That's well ahead of Microsoft's 16.9 per cent and Google's 5.8 per cent.

But the Jeff-Bezos-run titan's enormous growth has begun to slow recently as other providers catch up. Of the big four cloud providers, Google grew the most last year, swelling 87.8 per cent, Microsoft came in second, with 64 per cent growth. Alibaba was close behind with 63.8 per cent. But AWS's growth, at 36 per cent, was half that of its nearest rival.

AWS still posted the biggest revenue increase in absolute terms with $9.2bn compared with Microsoft's $7.1bn but many saw the pair's recent financial results as an early sign that rival services were beginning to catch up with Bezos' behemoth.

Google Cloud's chief exec, Thomas Kurian, recently committed to tripling the size of his sales team as part of a wider restructure. The former Oracle exec has pushed for more services to woo enterprise customers, and is looking to expand Google's reseller network.

Last week, the company inked a deal with LA-based service provider SADA to resell $500m in Google Cloud services over the next three years. Google plans to invest $10bn into data centres and offices across the US this year.

Arch-rival Microsoft has shifted its focus to aggressively target Amazon's cloud clients. The strategy is working, according to some analysts. Last year, Redmond surprised everyone by beating AWS to win the US Department of Defense's $10bn decade-long JEDI IT supply deal, which seeks to switch the the US's military data over to the cloud. AWS appealed the decision and was granted a pause on the contract until the courts came to a decision on whether or not it was awarded fairly.

The new hires make up the first sales shakeup at AWS in several years. Up to now, the cloud giant has focused on selling basic building block services, such as its cloud servers and storage. But the company is now shifting focus to finished products, like Pinpoint, which helps manage marketing campaigns, and Fraud Detector, a service the company is currently testing that detects online fraud. Other AWS services include Outposts and Local Zones.

Amazon recently reported revenues of $280.5bn up 20 per cent on the previous year. About a tenth of this came from AWS, which generated $35.03bn.

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AWS to double sales droids as Google, Microsoft's growing clouds threaten to gobble larger slices of Bezos' pie - The Register