Category Archives: Google

The number of start-ups funded by Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Apple in 2021 thus far has surged beyond pre-Covid levels. Together the five companies have invested in 57 start-ups this year as against only 21 firms in 2019, according to data from Tracxn. And this year is not even over yet.

The numbers went up in 2020 too FAMGA invested in 32 start-ups last year, a marked increase from the 21 start-ups funded in 2019.

This year, among FAMGA, Google has funded the highest number of start-ups (29), followed by Microsoft and Amazon with investments in 12 start-ups each. Facebook has funded three this year (until November 19, 2021) and Apple has funded one, Tracxn data showed.

Google to double workforce in India in two years: Sanjay Gupta

The number of Indian start-ups that garnered investments from FAMGA this year has also surpassed pre-Covid levels. Of the 57 start-ups funded by FAMGA this year, 10 are Indian firms. This is a jump from the six firms funded last year and the four start-ups funded in 2019.

Here too, Google tops the list Google has funded five Indian start-ups this year, followed by Amazon at three firms, and Microsoft and Facebook with one start-up each. Indias stat has also overtaken Chinas numbers the last recorded FAMGA funding for a start-up based out of China was in 2019 Google invested in Chinas KaiOS an operating system for mobile devices for a Series B round.

The type of Indian start-ups funded by FAMGA this year mirrors the global trend they are spread across different sectors ranging from hyper-local delivery to e-commerce websites to marketplaces to fintech platforms. The list includes Dunzo, a start-up that provides multi-category home delivery services, Meesho, an online marketplace and reselling platform offering various products, DotPe, a firm that provides online ordering and customer engagement solutions for restaurants, and OYO, an app-based aggregator of budget hotel accommodations.

Original post:

Google, Microsoft and Amazon invest in more start-ups this year, surpassing pre-Covid levels - The Hindu BusinessLine

With so many streaming services taking over our consumption of media, it's nice to have a dedicated media streamer that consolidates all of your subscriptions into a single place and does the job well. As our upcoming runner-up pick, the Roku Streaming Stick 4K replaces the older Streaming Stick+, doing everything the older model did plus a few new tricks. The new Streaming Stick 4K supports all major 4K HDR standards, including Dolby Vision, HLG, and HDR10+, as well as Dolby Atmos audio. The inclusion of AirPlay 2 also makes it a good choice for streaming music and movies from Apple devices as well. The only major caveat is that Roku is currently in a dispute with Google, which resulted in the removal of the YouTube TV app for a long time and may cause the removal of the regular YouTube app soon. But if you're not going to be using this streaming stick for YouTube content, this is an excellent streaming stick to pick up.

Excerpt from:

The 30+ Best Cyber Monday TV Deals from Samsung, TCL, LG, Vizio and Sony - The New York Times

Google Docs is an online word processor developed by the tech giant, Google, which lets its users create and edit text documents in the web browser without using any special software.

Users can use smart editing and styling tools provided by Google Docs to format texts and paragraphs. However, a Google Docs document can also be easily downloaded for offline use.

Interestingly, the 'Make available offline feature in Google Docs lets users edit a Google Document even without an internet connection (offline editing). However, the changes made are reflected in the document once the internet connection is restored.

Step 1: Install Google Docs offline extension on your device using Google Chrome Browser. For this, select the Add to Chrome option and then choose Add Extension.

Step 2: After installation, navigate to Google Drive to enable offline mode.

Step 3: In Google Drive, select the Settings icon given in the upper right corner of your screen.

Step 4: Scroll down to find the Offline option. Then, tick the check box given next to the option Create, open and edit your recent Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides on this device while offline.

Step 5: Lastly, select the Done option given in the top right corner of the screen.

Once youve enabled the offline mode, the next step is to choose specific Google Docs that you want offline for editing.

Step 1: To enable offline mode for editing a specific document, head to the main page of Google Drive.

Step 2: Then, find the Google doc that you wish to view or edit offline.

Step 3: If on desktop, right-click on the document. Then, from the given options, right slide the toggle bar given next to the option Available offline.

Step 4: On the mobile app, youll need to tap the three dots given next to the document name. Then, select the option Make available offline.

Once completed, you'll be able to easily access the selected documents for editing. Interestingly, you can view and edit your document in the same way you would online.

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Read more:

Want to use and edit Google Docs without an internet connection? Here's how you can do it - India Today

Google will call YouTuber FriendlyJordies as a witness in a defamation case brought by John Barilaro, in a move the former NSW deputy premier's lawyer sayswill "no doubt aggravate the damage".

Mr Barilaro is suing in the Federal Court over the publication of a series of videos last year.

He has discontinued the case against Jordan Shanks, aka FriendlyJordies, after the satirist's barrister read out an apology in court earlier this month, accepting some of the videos were offensive to the politician.

Portions of the sketches that attracted defamation allegations were edited out, but the case against Google continues.

Barrister Lyndelle Barnett, for Google, today told Justice Steven Rares the tech giant would call Mr Shanks, but would not be adducing all evidence it had previously planned.

The confirmation came as Mr Barilaro's barrister, Sue Chrysanthou SC, pressed Google on Mr Shanks's potential appearance after it "reserved the right" to call him.

She said it would be "some work" to cross-examine the satirist if he was called and suggested the tech giant would "no doubt aggravate the damage to my client by doing so".

Ms Chrysanthou also accused Google of creating unnecessary "busy work" by seeking special orders, beyond the usual undertakings given by litigants, to protect confidentiality on parts of documents Google was asked to produce.

They were "apparently to protect people's email addresses", Ms Chrysanthou told the court.

"These are not state secrets," she said.

"The notion that a person is allowed to either redact documents or prohibit access for something in the nature my friend describes is, with respect to her, absurd."

Ms Barnett insisted Google was not arguing the documents should not be made available, but merely to "engage" with their opposition and seek recognition of "sensitivity" in some of the material.

Justice Rares questioned what could justify a confidentiality order, describing the request as "ridiculous" and "puerile".

"This is just storms in teacups that are unnecessary," the judge said.

Google also suggested Mr Barilaro gave "implied consent" for the edited videos to be published.

But the judge said the securing of a deal to remove parts of the video that gave rise to imputations did not mean Mr Barilaro consented to the rest of the videos being published.

Ms Chrysanthou described the consent argument as a "false issue".

"We're not happy that Google continues to publish videos that contain racist remarks, like 'greaseball Ned Kelly', but again that's just a question of hurt," she said.

The trial has been set down for 10 daysin March.

The rest is here:

Google will call YouTube comedian FriendlyJordies as witness in John Barilaro defamation case - ABC News

When Google introduced Manifest V3 in 2019, web extension developers were alarmed at the amount of functionality that would be taken away for features they provide users. Especially features like blocking trackers and providing secure connections. This new iteration of Google Chromes web extensions interface still has flaws that might be addressed through thoughtful consensus of the web extension developer community. However, two years and counting of discussion and conflict around Manifest V3 have ultimately exposed the problematic power Google holds over how millions of people experience the web. With the more recent announcement of the official transition to Manifest V3 and the deprecation of Manifest V2 in 2023, many privacy based web extensions will be mitigated in how they are able to protect users.

The security and privacy claims that Google has made about web extensions may or may not be addressed with Manifest V3. But the fact remains that the extensions that users have relied on for privacy will be heavily stunted if the current proposal moves forward. A move that was presented as user-focused, actually takes away the users power to block unwanted tracking for their security and privacy needs.

Large Influence, Little Challenge

First, a short history lesson. In 2015, Mozilla announced its move to adopt the webRequest API, already used by Chrome, in an effort to synchronize the landscape for web extension developers. Fast forwarding to the Manifest V3 announcement in 2019, Google put Mozilla in the position of choosing to split or sync with their Firefox browser. Splitting would mean taking a strong stand against Manifest V3 as an alternative and supporting web extensions developers innovation in user privacy controls. Syncing would mean going along with Googles plan for the sake of not splitting up web extension development any further.

Mozilla has decided to support Manifest V2s blocking webRequest API and MV3s declarativeNetRequest API for now. A move that is very much shaped by Googles push to make MV3 the standard, supporting both APIs is only half the battle. MV3 dictates an ecosystem change that limits MV2 extensions and would likely force MV2 based extensions to conform to MV3 in the near future. Mozillas acknowledgement that MV3 doesnt meet web extension developers needs shows that MV3 is not yet ready for prime time. Yet, there is pressure to get stable, trusted extensions to allocate resources to port their extensions to more limited versions of themselves with a less stable API.

Manifest V3 Technical Issues

Even though strides have been made in browser security and privacy, web extensions like Privacy Badger, NoScript, and uBlock Origin have filled the gap of providing the granular control users want. One of the most significant changes outlined in Manifest V3 is the removal of blocking webRequest API and the flexibility it gave developers to programmatically handle network requests on behalf of the user. Queued to replace blocking webRequest API, the declarativeNetRequest API includes low caps on how many sites these extensions could cover. Another mandate is moving from Background Pages, a context that allows web extension developers to properly assess and debug, to an alternative, less powerful context called Background Service Workers. This context wasnt originally built with web extension development in mind, which has led to its own conversation in many forums.

In short, Service Workers were meant for a sleep/wake cycle of web asset-to-user deliveryfor example, caching consistent images and information so the user wont need to use a lot of resources when reconnecting to that website again with a limited connection. Web extensions need persistent communication between the extension and the browser, often based on user interaction, like being able to detect and block ad trackers as they load onto the web page in real time. This has resulted in a significant list of issues that will have to be addressed to cover many valid use cases. These discussions, however, are happening as web extension developers are being asked to port to MV3 in the next year without a stable workflow available with pending issues such as no defined service worker context for web extensions, pending WebAssembly support, and lack of consistent and direct support from the Chrome extensions team itself.

Privacy SandStorm

Since the announcement of Manifest V3, Google has announced several controversial Privacy Sandbox proposals for privacy mechanisms for Chrome. The highest-stakes discussions about these proposals are in the World Wide Web Consortium, or W3C. While technically anyone can listen into the open meetings, only W3C members can propose formal documentation on specifications and have leadership positions. Being a member has its own overhead of fees and time commitment. This is something a large multinational corporation can easily overcome, but it can be a barrier to user-focused groups. Unless these power dynamics are directly addressed, a participants voice gets louder with market share.

Recently this year, after the many Google forum-based discussions around Manifest V3, a WebExtensions Community Group has been formed in the W3C. Community group participation does not require W3C membership, but they do not produce standards. Chaired by employees from Google and Apple, this group states that by specifying the APIs, functionality, and permissions of WebExtensions, we can make it even easier for extension developers to enhance end user experience, while moving them towards APIs that improve performance and prevent abuse.

But this move for greater democracy would have been more powerful and effective before Googles unilateral push to impose Manifest V3. This story is disappointingly similar to what occurred with Googles AMP technology: more democratic discussions and open governance were offered only after AMP had become ubiquitous.

With the planned deprecation of Manifest V2 extensions, the decision has already been made. The rest of the web extensions community are forced to comply, deviate from, or leave a large browser extension ecosystem that doesnt include Chrome. And thats harder than it may sound: Chromium, the open-source browser engine based on Chrome, is the basis for Microsoft Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, and Brave. Statements have been made by Vivaldi, Brave, and Opera on MV3 and their plans to preserve ad-blockers and privacy preserving features of MV2, yet the ripple effects are clear when Chrome makes a major change.

What Does A Better MV3 Look Like?

Some very valid concerns and asks have been raised with the W3C Web Extensions Community Group that would help to propel the web extensions realm back to a better place.

Even though one may see the moves between web extensions API changes and privacy mechanism proposals as two separate endeavors, it speaks to the expansive power of how one company can impact the ecosystem of the web; both when they do great things, and when they make bad decisions. The question that must be asked is who has the burden of enforcing what is fair: the standards organizations that engage with large company proposals or the companies themselves? Secondly, who has the most power if one constituency says no and another says yes? Community partners, advocates, and smaller companies are permitted to say no and not work with companies who enter the room frequently with worrying proposals, but then that company can claim that silence means consensus when they decide to go forward with a plan. Similar dynamics have occurred before when the W3C grappled with Do Not Track (DNT) where proponents of weaker privacy mechanisms feigned concern over user privacy and choice. So in this case, large companies like Google can make nefarious or widely useful decisions without much incentive to say no to themselves. In the case of MV3, they gave room and time to discuss issues with the web extensions community. That is the bare minimum standard for making such a big change, so to congratulate a powerful entity for making space for many other voices would only add to the sentiment that this should be the norm in open web politics.

No matter how well meaning a proposal can be, the reality is millions of peoples experiences on the internet are often left up to the ethics of a few in companies and standards organizations.

Read more from the original source:

Manifest V3: Open Web Politics in Sheep's Clothing - EFF

American Vandal is a hilarious true crime parody. Well worth watching.

Don't want to ruin the finale of Netflix's 2017 sleeper hit, American Vandal? Then don't Google "who did the dicks".

But if you can't imagine a world in which you would submit that search query, you clearly haven't had the pleasure of making the mocu-series' acquaintance. In my experience, not enough people have and that's a shame.

It could be the show's prickly premise -- American Vandal's unofficial log line is "Serial, but with dick jokes." Maybe most people, myself excluded, won't say, "You had me at dick jokes." But here's where I adopt the whiny voice befitting someone who enjoys toilet humor as much as I do: You just have to tryyyyyy it. Truuuuust me!

If you enjoy either Serial or dick jokes, though, I can almost guarantee you'll love American Vandal, created by Dan Perrault and Tony Yacenda of CollegeHumor. And if you're lucky enough to enjoy both (and, honestly, who among us... ?), this canceled-before-its-time mystery series deserves a prominent spot on your Netflix "My List."

Read more: The best Netflix documentaries to watch this weekend

The crime at the center of American Vandal is an act of vandalism that's NSFW.

Set in the not-quite-historical year of our Lord 2015, American Vandal is an incisive, deadpan send-up of the true-crime genre, which experienced a remarkable renaissance in the same pop cultural epoch. In 2014, we had the podcast Serial, of course, and then HBO and Netflix delivered The Jinx and Making a Murderer, respectively, in short order. (Cult classic The Staircase was also dredged from the depths of 2004 with new episodes around this time, to meet the audience's insatiable demand for the examination and narrativization of evidentiary minutiae.)

But American Vandal sets itself apart from the true-crime milieu by being... not true. Hulu has since gotten in on this fictional-true-crime beat with Only Murders in the Building, a comedy starring Selena Gomez that joins a growing tradition of mockumentaries, parodies, satires and spoofs of the genre, which American Vandal pioneered. So if you've binged Only Murders and haven't yet seen American Vandal, you've got some catching up to do.

Read more: 2021 best new TV shows to watch, stream, obsess about

The scene of the crime in American Vandal.

Set in a nondescript West Coast high school, American Vandal is, in the world of the show, filmed by sophomore Peter Maldonado (Tyler Alvarez), an aspiring documentary filmmaker, and Sam Ecklund (Griffin Gluck), his best friend. Their school, Hanover High, is reeling from a heinous crime: Someone has spray-painted dicks on 27 cars in the teachers' parking lot, and the teachers demand justice. A witness to the crime, the sweaty-foreheaded Alex Trimboli, points a finger at Dylan Maxwell (Jimmy Tatro), the school's resident burnout. And everyone's pretty content to place the blame on Dylan. Everyone, that is, except Peter and Sam.

Jimmy Tatro as Dylan in American Vandal.

Dylan has a good motive, a bad alibi, and a well-documented propensity for dick doodles. But with a little digging, it becomes clear that not everything adds up. For one thing, Alex Trimboli is a notorious liar. (Did he really get a hand job from the hottest girl in school, or did she merely text him "heyy" with two Ys?) And another: There was no ball hair included in the spray painted graffiti. Dylan's dick pics always include ball hair.

The series is populated by the kind of hyperparticular archetypes not seen since the sexually active band geeks of Mean Girls. Social media use at Hanover High is unrelenting, but the show brooks no hand-wringing over screen time. In fact, the majority of the clues added to Peter and Sam's string-crossed corkboard come from the digital detritus of Snapchat, Twitch, Instagram and text messages, and the audience comes to appreciate the implausible surfeit of saved Snaps taken the night of "Nana's party."

"Who did the dicks?" becomes American Vandal's "Who shot JR?" (And it's always "dicks," never penises, schlongs or even ding-a-lings.) In the show's second season, the central question morphs into, "Who is the Turd Burglar?" and its pursuit of justice is as childishly funny as season one's. The only difference is that by season two you're no longer surprised at how funny it can be when such lowbrow subject matter is given the highbrow treatment. It's funny because it's stupid.

What I love most about American Vandal is its ability to evolve. It would be easy enough for some studio exec or Big Data bot to come up with the "Serial meets dick jokes" premise and assume the scripts will just write themselves. But my hunch is that even the most talented yarn-spinners can't carry an eight-episode arc on the backs of dicks alone. Instead American Vandal is a Trojan (tee-hee) horse, luring you in with dick-jokes candy, then serving up a wholesome, plant-based indictment of our lurid interest in the real crimes that traumatize real people.

Before the show reaches its polemic finale, though, it indulges the very whims it eventually eviscerates, by which I mean it becomes a genuinely engrossing mystery show. So maybe you don't like toilet humor, but you must like the idea of having your cake and eating it too. In its way, American Vandal is like a nicotine patch, delivering a safe dosage of your craving to mitigate future harm. It's all the indulgence of the true-crime experience without the guilt of treating someone's death like must-see TV. Plus, it's funny.

American Vandal's truly compelling central mystery hits all the right true-crime beats: alibis examined and lied about; red herrings; CGI reproductions of alleged dockside hand jobs; a dick-drawing time-test to see if Alex Trimboli's purported timeline is even feasible. Season one even has its own Nisha call -- The Kiefer Sutherland voice mail -- and there's a thriving second-screen experience waiting for you on Reddit and in spoiler-laden theory roundups if you're the rabbit-hole type.

Unfortunately, it seems American Vandal season three may be a hopeless dream at this point. Though initial headlines around Netflix's ouster seemed promising ("'American Vandal' Canceled at Netflix, Will Be Shopped Elsewhere," for instance), Perrault and Yacenda have since pivoted their raillery toward the world of esports, with a forthcoming Paramount Plus mockumentary called Players. But maybe, just maybe, if enough people take my advice and give the show a chance, the streaming gods will reward us with another season.

Who did the dicks, indeed. Give the show 15 minutes, and you'll have to know, too.

See the original post here:

Why you need to watch the strangest 'true crime' show on Netflix - CNET

Google is adding a handful of new features to Google Maps in time for the holiday season, which collectively should make getting around a slightly less fraught experience. The new features were announced in a blog post today.

A new Area Busyness feature provides information on how popular neighborhoods are rather than just specific destinations, while the apps Directory tab is rolling out globally to give more info on the stores and amenities inside locations like malls and airports. Google Maps is also expanding its grocery pickup tracking feature to cover more stores across the US, and is attempting to make its restaurant reviews more detailed.

Area Busyness is an expansion of the information Google Maps already provides about the crowdedness of public transit and the popularity of specific stores and locations throughout the week. Now, rather than just offering details on specific places, Google Maps will be able to give information on how busy a general neighborhood is. Google hopes that the feature will be able to both let users avoid crowds, or hunt them down if theyre in the mood for a party atmosphere. Google says that Area Busyness will be rolling out globally on Android and iOS in time for this holiday season.

Meanwhile, the Directory tab will be available for any airports, malls, and transit stations around the world where Google has data available. It shows which amenities (such as airport lounges and parking lots) and stores are available inside places that are often shown as just a single location in Google Maps. Then, the app can provide granular information like opening hours and customer ratings. The Directory tab will also be available globally on iOS and Android.

The services restaurant reviews are also getting more detailed, with additional information on price ranges. Its also simplifying the process of adding information on facilities like outdoor seating and delivery options.

Google Maps is also expanding its grocery pickup feature, which lets users track their order status and then share with the store when they expect to arrive for collection without ever leaving the app. The feature was first launched earlier this year, and has since expanded to cover over 2,000 stores across 30 US states including Kroger Family stores like Kroger, Frys, Ralphs and Marianos, Google says.

Read the rest here:

Googles latest Maps features help you avoid the holiday shopping crowds - The Verge

Google Cloud announced a multiyear partnership with Cohere, an early-stage startup that is building a natural language processing platform to make it easier for developers to build natural language processing models into applications. The solution requires a fair amount of infrastructure resources to pull off, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is going to provide them under the terms of this deal.

The two companies are also planning a go-to-market effort together, giving Cohere a big lift as a startup to help jumpstart usage and sales with the power of the GCP sales team.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said that Cohere offers a great use case for Google Cloud Tensor Processing Unit (TPUs) chips that builds on work Google has been doing in-house.

First of all, this is a perfect example of a technology that we built at Google for our own use, these high-scale TPUs. Were now making them available in the cloud to other platform companies, Kurian told me. But here is an example [with Cohere] where they find that the ability to use and build models and train them on TPUs provides them very differentiated capability.

Aidan Gomez, co-founder and CEO at Cohere, who previously worked at Google Brain, said his company is trying to build an NLP solution that makes all of this advanced technology available to any developer. We scrape the data to train these big models, we train them on massive TPU pods, and we optimize them because theyre extremely large, and want them to fit the latency tolerances of pretty much any production system, Gomez explained.

He said that by optimizing the workloads, Cohere can open up access to all of this advanced technology, enabling developers to access the models and start building NLP-based solutions based on the models that Cohere is providing. Kurian said that he is starting to see this shift from the text-based UI to one thats more driven by natural language interactions, and Cohere is a good example of how to make this happen.

If you look at the state of the art, the way that the vast majority of people use computers is through graphical user interfaces or screens. I dont think that people want to experience computers through just one sense, which is the sense of sight, Kurian said. They want to interact with computers in more ways and they want to interact in more natural ways. So language is the next big phase of evolution of the way that people interact with systems.

Its not every day that you see the CEO of one of the big three cloud platforms get on a call to discuss a partnership with a startup, but Kurian believes this is a particularly compelling and creative example of TPU usage. If you actually use the Cohere technology, you will find that it works very elegantly because of the combination of the software that Aidans team has built and the computational infrastructure that TPUs provide.

Cohere was founded in 2019 by Gomez, Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang in Toronto. The company has raised $40 million from Index Ventures, Radical Ventures, Section 32, and a whos who of industry AI angels including Geoffrey Hinton and Fei-Fei Li, among others.

Link:

Google Cloud teams up with NLP startup Cohere on multiyear partnership around TPUs - TechCrunch

Thomas Kurian, chief executive officer of cloud services at Google LLC, speaks during the Google Cloud Next '19 event in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Tuesday, April 9, 2019. The conference brings together industry experts to discuss the future of cloud computing.

Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images

At Google's weekly all-hands meeting on Thursday afternoon, CEO Sundar Pichai and cloud boss Thomas Kurian tried to address concerns about the company's potential pursuit of a multibillion-dollar cloud deal with the Defense Department.

A question about Google's involvement with the government's Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) program received so many votes by employees in an internal system called Dory that it was brought up to executives at the meeting.

Pichai read aloud the question, which referenced a New York Times report from earlier this month. That story said Google is actively pursuing JWCC, after the Pentagon canceled a prior deal, the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, in July. The question received almost 1,000 employee votes.

CNBC obtained audio of the event, known as TGIF, and viewed a screenshot of the question.

"The NYT reports that Google is aggressively pursuing the DoD's Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability despite not bidding on its predecessor (JEDI) because it doesn't align with its AI principles (no work on weapons or technologies that cause harm)," Pichai said, reading from the question on Dory. "What changed? What is the bid about and why is it ok?"

Kurian responded by attempting to differentiate the contract from JEDI, a $10 billion deal that produced a legal battle between Amazon and Microsoft before the government canceled the contract altogether.

"Recently, there's been some discussion regarding Google's interest in participating in the framework," said Kurian, who joined Google in 2018 following a lengthy career at Oracle.

"If selected as one of the compliant vendors, we are proud to work with the DoD to help modernize their operations," Kurian said, appearing to read from a script. "There will be many areas where our product capabilities and our engineering expertise can be brought to bear with no conflict to Google's AI principles."

Google established its AI principles after declining to renew a government contract called Project Maven, which helped the government analyze and interpret drone videos using artificial intelligence. Prior to ending the deal, several thousand employees signed a petition and dozens resigned in opposition to Google's involvement.

Google dropped out of the bidding for the JEDI contract in part because the company "couldn't be sure" it would align with the company's AI principles, it said at the time.

Kurian on Thursday described how the DoD is the largest employer in the world with nearly 3 million employees. He said the JWCC is designed as a "procurement framework" for the 28 main agencies within the DoD. He also highlighted other work Google does for the U.S. government, such as helping agencies with weather predictions, working with the military to detect cancer and helping the Air Force with aircraft maintenance.

Pichai and Kurian are navigating a sensitive issue for Google, as the company tries to bolster its cloud-computing division with high-profile deals while also placating an increasingly vocal and politically charged employee base. While Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page are still major shareholders in parent company Alphabet, they retired from their executive positions in 2019, leading to a dramatic cultural shift for a company that was once known for its idealism.

Kurian isn't expecting all of his staffers to get behind him on the JWCC.

"We understand that not every Googler will agree with this decision," Kurian said. "But we believe Google Cloud should seek to serve the government where it is capable of doing so and where the work meets Google's principles and our company's values."

Google went into greater detail on the topic in a blog post that Kurian published Thursday evening. In the post, Kurian described the JWCC as "essential to the success of the Department and the government in reducing costs, driving innovation, increasing productivity, and enhancing cybersecurity." He added that the DoD should solicit assistance from numerous vendors, including Google Cloud.

Kurian underscored that point at the meeting, telling employees that multiple vendors will be in on the deal, potentially giving each the option to choose where they want to focus.

"That means no single vendor has to do all the work contemplated under the framework," he said.

Kurian said Google hasn't put in a bid yet, and doesn't know all the details because the request for proposal hasn't been sent by the government. He didn't address one specific detail from the Times story, which said Google's cloud unit has already made the work a priority declaring it a "Code Yellow," which allows the company to pull engineers onto the military project.

A Google spokesperson told CNBC in an email that a "multi-cloud strategy" is the best solution for the government and said the company will evaluate "future bid opportunities" with its public sector customers, including the DoD.

Pichai chimed in at Thursday's meeting to tell employees that he hoped the discussion helped clarify the company's position.

"I think we are strongly committed to working with the government in a way that's consistent with our AI principles," he said.

WATCH: Google and C3 AI team up to grow AI in the cloud

More:

Google's pursuit of military cloud deal was among top issues at last week's all-staff meeting - CNBC

Imagine if this could fold. Imagine it. Photo: Sam Rutherford / Gizmodo

For a brief moment in time, the rumor mill had us holding out hope that Google had a foldable Pixel on the horizon. But all that blind faith was for naught, as the never-announced Google Pixel Fold is reportedly not happening.

Ross Young, who has sources inside the supply chain via his work atDisplay Supply Chain Consultants (DSCC), suggests that whatever Pixel foldable Google was planning to manufacture has been canceled. Young tweeted that multiple sources confirmed the company is not bringing the Pixel Fold to market in 2021 or the first half of 2022.

Its possible Google is ceasing production until it can make a product that competes with Samsung at the same price point. Its also possible that the pricing of components for the Pixel Fold would have been too much to consider the risk of launching into such a nascent product category.

Our sources indicated that Google believed the product wouldnt be as competitive as it needed to be, Young wrote. They likely figured that competing against Samsung in the U.S. and Europe in a small niche market facing higher costs than their primary competitor, would stack the odds against this project.

The Pixel Fold was expected to have similar specs as theGalaxy Z Fold 3, including a similar internal folding display with a 120Hz refresh rate. But it could have fallen short in other ways. The Pixel Fold was rumored to include the same image sensors as the old Pixel 5, which would have undoubtedly impacted the Folds performance in the saturated smartphone market. The novelty of a folding smartphone fades away when the camera isnt as good as what your friend is using.

On the plus side, this might mean that Google has more time to work out Android 12L. This version will help Android function better on large-screen devices, though it will also benefit foldables. There are also other rumors that Google was working on a second foldable device along with the Pixel Fold. The references were spotted in code under the name Jumbojack by blogs like 9to5Google.

One particular feature pointed out during that discovery was a posture API, which refers to code that can indicate the physical state the device is in, like whether its half-opened or closed. Its a feature that would greatly benefit a Pixel foldable, and Android foldables overall.

Maybe well never know whether Google planned to release a foldable phone. At least Samsung continues to carry the torch for anyone willing to shell out a lot of money to be on the cutting edge.

Originally posted here:

Google Has Reportedly Canceled Its Never-Announced Foldable Phone - Gizmodo