Category Archives: Google

Times have certainly been turbulent for those working on health and wellness projects at Google.

The tech giants Google Health division underwent two reorgs this summer, the latter of which resulted in department chief David Feinberg, M.D., jumping ship to lead health IT company Cerner and the Google Health team being scattered across the rest of the companys health adjacent projects.

Internal memos and comments from the company suggested Google was winding back its siloed health approach to instead bake health-focused capabilities into its various existing business linessurfacing verified health information on YouTube or providing care navigation help through Google Maps, for example.

Despite the organizational shuffle, Chief Health Officer Karen DeSalvo, M.D., says the company has done anything but scale back its health efforts.

Our overall goal is to help billions around the world be healthyand that is a big, audacious goal, DeSalvo said during a Sunday keynote at HLTH 2021 in Boston.

I want people to understandfrom the moment I walked in the door, my remit, my work, has been not only to think about how were going to help the healthcare sector but what are we going to do to see that theres authoritative information on all of our platforms, she said. Its quite frankly one of the things thats been most exciting to me about the company because we know that we can reach literally billions of people and give them good information to help them make better choices about their health or to navigate their care journey.

RELATED: Google says health projects will continue even as it unwinds dedicated health division

DeSalvo said her team now guides Google on the health components of its authoritative information services, its regulated medical products and its employee health and safety. She noted that the last area has been a particular focus for her over the course of the pandemic, though so much of what weve learned about education around testing or vaccines or how to do better forecasting has been applicable to the work weve done outside.

The broader, complementary strategy does make quantifying the successes of her team a bit less straightforward.

Some areas, like wearables or the provider-focused Care Studio suite, can be judged by sales numbers or user feedback. Consumer health messaging initiatives can similarly be tracked by webpage impressions, while more complex projects like health screening AI can be proven to healthcare stakeholders via the industrys various quality measurement tools.

However, DeSalvo said her teams mandate at Google isnt so much driving profits through singular products or services. Rather, its driving health improvements for as many people as possible to achieve the downstream benefits of a healthy customer base.

RELATED: YouTube partners with Mass General on health content amid misinformation backlash

Our get up every morning, raison d'tre, is impact. Its helping billions around the world be healthier, she said. Its built into the DNA of the company and the way we think about it, which, going back to that iteration were on now, [means] its not just one product area or one department. We really are thinking about how we weave health into all parts of our business, because if we do that its good for the user, which is good for customers, which is good for business. It just makes sense to us.

That emphasis on scale is a boon for DeSalvo, who comes from a medical and public health background. Providers and public agencies only have so much reach into an individuals life, she explained, limiting the impact they have on health education and decision-making.

Those limitations are stark in relation to Googles ubiquitous platforms, which two years ago offered an opportunity that DeSalvo couldnt refuse.

Were with people all across their life flow, when theyre making decisions about what food to buy or where to exercise or when theyre trying to learn more about whether or not they should get a flu shot, she said. We can do those health things, but also we have programs around education and economic opportunity. This is, for me then, this marrying together of great care and addressing social determinants of health and equity all in one company.

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HLTH21: DeSalvo says baking health into all Google's efforts opens the door to 'billions' of healthy consumers - FierceHealthcare

Blue Shield of California and Google Cloud are joining forces to digitize and simplify the healthcare billing and payment process.

Together, the companies will create a real-time claims processing platform leveraging automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. The platform will be designed to streamline the back-end billing processes between Blue Shield of California and the providers it contracts with.

The solution will extract clinical data from the providers EMR and then codify that record into a digital claim for billing, said Lisa Davis, senior vice president and chief information officer at Blue Shield of California. The payer will adjudicate that claim and send back a claim settlement decision to the provider, which will be shared with the patient in near real time.

Today, we all have an experience where we leave the doctors office, and we have no idea what were paying for, Davis said in a phone interview. We get this cryptic letter that says you have received X servicesand there is a cost associated with that. So, imagine being able to createa retail-like experience where I go into the doctors office, I know exactly what I am paying for, I know exactly what those costs are.

The companies have proved out a pilot case where the entire process, from extracting the clinical data to sending back a claim settlement decision, is done in less than 10 seconds, Davis added.

The platform will run on Google Cloud infrastructure. It will leverage Google capabilities to ingest, harmonize and normalize the clinical data collected from EMRs into the cloud data layer, said Aashima Gupta, director of Global Healthcare Solutions at Google Cloud.

Further, Google Cloud provides AI capabilities that the platform will use to glean insights from unstructured data like clinicians notes.

The wealth of information is still in clinical notes, Gupta said in a phone interview. We need to extract the data out of the unstructured notes to a structured format and thats where our technology like healthcare NLP can be super useful.

One of the main goals of the collaboration is to reduce the amount spent on claims processing.

Almost $256 billion is wasted due to the administrative complexity within the healthcare system [and] a large portion of that is related to health claims adjudication and settlement, Davis said.

Another goal is to improve the patient and provider experience by alleviating the uncertainty of payment for patients and making the process more seamless for providers.

Blue Shield and Google are in the process of building their platform, which will be launched next year and tested by pilot partners, after which it will be available to all payers.

The pandemic has brought to the forefront the need for digitization in healthcare in general, Gupta said. Our partnership leverages the strength of both companies We are looking at this as a business transformation opportunity.

Photo: mikdam, Getty Images

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Blue Shield of California, Google Cloud to develop real-time claims processing platform - MedCity News

Thomas Kurians arrival at Google Cloud in early 2019 after more than 22 years at Oracle marked a significant shift in Googles thinking, putting an emphasis on expanding its clouds business use by enterprises as the key to making up ground on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure in the booming global cloud market.

Google Cloud has closely followed that enterprise drumbeat over the past two-plus years, building out its infrastructure, extending its each from the cloud into on-premises datacenters and out to the edge and leveraging its research and expertise in such rapidly emerging areas as artificial intelligence (AI) and data analytics.

Google Cloud remains in third place in a global cloud infrastructure services space that Synergy Research Group said hit $42 billion in the second quarter, a $2.7 billion increase from the first quarter and a 39 percent jump from the same period in 2020. AWS still holds a commanding 33 percent market share, followed by Microsoft at 20 percent and Google at 10 percent. The market research firm said that both Microsoft and Google had chipped away at AWS lead over previous quarters, but that Amazon had in the second quarter had regained much of that ground.

John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy, noted that the cloud services space continues to be a runaway success for those three and other cloud providers, but that success came at a cost. Amazon, Microsoft and Google are spending a combined $25 billion in capex every quarter, with much of that being spent on building and equipping more than 340 hyperscale datacenters.

There remains a wealth of opportunity for smaller, more focused cloud providers, but it can be hard to look away from the eye-popping numbers coming out of the big three, he wrote.

That said, Google is seeing progress. In its latest quarterly financial numbers, cloud revenue for the company increased almost 54 percent year-over-year, to $4.63 billion. Operating losses also improved 58.7 percent, coming in at $591 million. The losses during the quarter in 2020 reached $1.43 billion.

Given all that, its not surprising that both Kurian, Google Clouds CEO, and Sundar Pichai, CEO of both Google and parent company Alphabet, during the keynote address at the virtual Cloud Next 21 event this week emphasized the success the cloud business has had and dropped the name of dozens of major enterprises ranging from Ford and Walmart to Loreal, Proctor and Gamble, Ikea and The Home Depot. The executives focused on a range of Google Cloud services, from its Data Cloud and BigQuery Omni, a data analytics tool powered by Google Clouds Anthos data and infrastructure management engine that can run not only in Google Cloud but also AWS and eventually Azure, to its array of consumer-focused services like Android, Nest, Assistant and Maps, which all contribute to technologies that help enterprises.

Our cloud platform is designed to help enterprises transform to digitization, built on deep investments we made in technical infrastructure over the past 23 years, Pichai said. Looking at our networking and datacenter investments alone, we have the largest network with the lowest latency of any cloud provider.

That infrastructure is continuing to grow its reach around the world. Google Cloud this year expanded into Warsaw, Poland, Delhi, India, Melbourne, Australia, and Toronto, giving the company 28 regions, with plans for 10 more, he said. Its connected by 19 subsea cables and will soon include optical fiber switching.

Google Cloud is extending the reach of its infrastructure and services deeper into enterprise datacenters and out to the rapidly evolving edge. As IT environments become more distributed and organizations adopt multicloud and hybrid cloud strategies, cloud providers like AWS, Microsoft, Google and Oracle have worked to establish a presence in on-premises datacenters to essentially play both sides of the cloud fence.

This includes AWS Outposts infrastructure that can be installed on premises and give organizations access AWS services. Microsoft offers similar capabilities via software and services with Azure Arc and Google Cloud made a push in that direction with Anthos, which enables enterprises to run their Kubernetes workloads in myriad environments, including those of rival cloud providers.

At the Cloud Next event, the company unveiled Google Distributed Cloud, a collection of fully managed software and hardware offerings that extends the infrastructure into datacenters and out to the edge, with the goal of bringing more enterprise workloads onto Google Cloud. Some workloads and data cant be migrated into the cloud for security, data sovereignty, compliance reasons or latency issues, so creating these distributed clouds can still take advantage of what the cloud has to offer, Sachin Gupta, vice president and general manager of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) at Google Cloud, wrote in a blog post.

Google Distributed Cloud taps into our planet-scale infrastructure that delivers the highest levels of performance, availability, and security, while Anthos running on Google-managed hardware at the customer or edge location provides a services platform on which to run applications securely and remotely, Gupta wrote.

Anthos is foundational to the strategy and the Google-managed hardware will be from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dell Technologies, Cisco Systems and NetApp, which will be the primary tech partner supporting the storage infrastructure in Google Distributed Cloud, Kurian said.

Google Distributed Cloud can run across a variety of locations, including Googles network edge, where organizations can use more than 140 global Google network edge locations and the operator edge network, which can be used for latency- and bandwidth-sensitive workloads and which gives enterprises access to 5G and LTE services offering by communication service providers (CSPs) partnering with Google.

There also are customer edge and remote locations such as retail stores, factory floors and branch offices, which need compute situated locally and customer datacenters and colocation facilities.

The first two products are Distributed Cloud Edge and Distributed Cloud Hosted. The first, which is in preview now, is built upon Googles telecommunications portfolio and is placed closer to where the data is being created. Organizations can run 5G and radio access network (RAN) tasks and enterprise applications at the edge to support such modern workloads as computer vision and AI edge inferencing.

Key partners in this include Ericsson and Nokia.

Distributed Cloud Hosted is aimed at public-sector entities and companies that run sensitive workloads that have to deal with requirements about where the data sites, privacy and security. Enterprises can run the product themselves or sign on with a Google-designated partner. Distributed Cloud Hosted doesnt require connectivity to Google Cloud to manage the infrastructure, services, APIs or tools and leverages a local control plane in Anthos for operations. It will be available in preview in the first half of next year.

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Google Muscles Its Way Into Datacenters, Attacks From The Edge - The Next Platform

The Pixel 6 phones are coming. How will they measure up to the Pixel 5?

With the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro just about to arrive, getting a new Pixel 5 right now is bound to result in instant buyer's remorse. Judging from all the rumors, the Pixel 6 platform will be a gigantic leap forward in terms of power, performance, features and design. That said, Google's new flagship class phones will also likely have sky-high sticker prices to match.

The question is though, just how far ahead of its predecessor will the Pixel 6 be? That fact is important because it'll determine whether you should drop your older Pixel immediately for Google's latest and greatest. Heck, if the Pixel 6 is all it's cracked up to be current then Pixel 5 owners will be tempted too.

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Read more:Pixel 6 is coming, but should you buy a Google Pixel 3, 4, 5 or 5A instead?

So no matter where you are in the Pixel phone upgrade cycle, knowing how well the Pixel 6 devices will stack up is an imperative. Here's how we expect Google's uber handsets will compare with last year's model.

When the Pixel 5 debuted last October it came with a $699 price tag. And at the time of this writing, it'll set you back just as much. But with all the advanced components the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro should boast, all bets are off.

Google typically offers its latest Pixel for the same price that the previous Pixel cost, but leaker Yogesh Brar speculates that the Pixel 6 could have a starting price of $749, while the Pixel Pro may cost between $1,049 and $1,099. This would make Google's new smartphone more expensive than its predecessor.

Google reportedly is angling to snatch premium phone market share away from Apple and Samsung. The Galaxy S21 ranges in price from $799 to $1,379. Similarly, the iPhone 13 costs anywhere from $799 to $1,099 depending on how you configure it. So it's a good call the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro will also demand top dollar.

Google's Pixel 6 phones will come in snazzy colors and have premium build quality.

All of Google's previous Pixel phones, including the Pixel 5, were deliberately designed not to distract from their screens. In the user's eye, the hardware was meant to drop away, serving as a mere vehicle for Google's Android software.

Not so with the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro. Minted in multiple splashy colors and apparently sporting glossy metal highlights, both handsets are clearly built to get noticed. That's a lot more visually exciting than the Pixel 5's two modest hues of "just black" and "sorta sage."

Now playing: Watch this: Google introduces Pixel 6 and 6 Pro

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One of the biggest improvements to the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro will be their imaging systems. Physically they're a lot bigger than the camera hardware you'll find on the Pixel 5. In fact these new cameras are so large they reside in a raised bar on the back side of each phone. They run the entire width of each handset too.

And if word on the street is true, there's a reason for the extra bulk. Rumor has it that the Pixel 6 camera platform is built around a massive main 50-megapixel sensor with a wide-angle lens. Both phones should have 12-megapixel ultrawide lens and sensor combos, too. The Pixel 6 Pro though will set itself apart with an additional 48-megapixel telephoto camera.

Either handset's camera system should run rings around the Pixel 5's hardware. That device ships with 16-megapixel ultrawide and 12.2-megapixel dual-pixel main camera sensors.

A first look at images and video allegedly taken on a Google Pixel 6 Pro were shared byYouTuber Brandon Lee, who runs the channel This is Tech Today. The images are shot in portrait mode and in dim lighting, but they showed off the phone's zoom and ultrawide capabilities giving a glimpse at what pictures and videos could look like on Google's new smartphone.

The Google Tensor chip's unveiling is a prominent part of the first official look at the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro.

In another seismic break from the past, the Pixel 6 phones will run in-house silicon. Specifically, at the heart of both the Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro is Google's new Tensor SoC (system on chip). Designed personally by Google engineers, much like Apple does with its A series mobile chips, the Tensor is tailor made for Android.

The result should be snazzed up computing and video processing performance. Hopefully this won't come at the expense of battery life either. Google hasn't yet released details about Tensor's speeds and feeds. That said, compared to the off-the-shelf Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G on the Pixel 5, this custom chip will likely be a big improvement.

The Pixel 6 and 6 Pro will likely be the first Google phones not to come with chargers in their boxes. At least that's what the tech giant said at the launch of the Pixel 5A. Other reports point to big improvements in charging. For example, according to 91mobiles the new flagship devices could support 33-watt fast wired charging.

And another report by Android Police suggests the new Pixel phones will interface with 23-watt wireless charging stations. In either case, that beats what the Pixel 5 can do. Its wireless charging tops out at 18 watts.

For more, here's how to decide between aPixel 5, Pixel 4 and Pixel 4XL, thePixel 5 versus the Pixel 4A 5Gand thePixel 5 versus the iPhone 11, Galaxy S20 FE and OnePlus 8. Plus,six reasons to buy a Pixel.

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Google Pixel 6 vs. Pixel 5: How we think the newer phone will stack up - CNET

Hardware season is heading for a dramatic finale next week, with three events from three major companies, three days in a row. Apple, Google and Samsung (in that order) are all hosting big events next week, getting their last big announcements (hopefully) out of the way ahead of the upcoming holiday season.

That means your friendly neighborhood hardware editor and much of the TechCrunch staff is set to be busy for the next few weeks, writing about and reviewing all manner of gadgets. Meantime, weve got some information to go off, in terms of what we can expect next week, through a combination of rumors, leaks and process of elimination.

That last bit holds especially true in the case of Apple and Samsung. Both companies are following recent big product unveils, and barring brand new product lines, we can triangulate whats likely next on the docket for each. Google, meanwhile, has essentially announced what its got brewing for Tuesday.

Lets work chronologically here.

Apple MacBook Pro silver keyboard. close up Mac on the blue background

Apples kicking things off Monday at 10AM PT/1PM ET. Its been just over a month since the companys latest event, which brought new iPhones, Apple Watches and iPads. One big missing product line was absent, however. We didnt see any new Macs. With macOS Monterey dropping any day now, and the companys already announced plans to upgrade its entire line to first-party silicon, the absence was felt at the event.

It seemed reasonable to expect the company might go the press release route, but instead, it looks like Apples opted to give Mac its moment in the spotlight. As Ive noted before, companies are generally less obligated to cram everything into a single event now that theyre not asking attendees to fly from around the world to be there. Some have taken liberties with this notion though I dont anticipate that to be the case here. At the very least, we expect some big Mac news, including:

Image Credits: Brian Heater

The first two essentially replace last years M1 models, which effectively had the same guts. A new, even faster M1X chip is said to be arriving, along with potential hardware redesigns. The 27-inch iMac, meanwhile, would augment the 24-inch model, serving as a more pro-focused system.

An overdue update to the entry-level AirPods are said to be in the works, as well, featuring improved sound quality and design more inline with the Pros but without active noise canceling.

Image Credits: Google

Speaking of new chips, Google already announced its plan to unveil its in-house Tensor chip, becoming the latest company to buck Qualcomm for first-party silicon. That will be used to power the new Pixel 6 and a Pro model. The handsets feature a radical redesign for a line thats been stumbling to stay afloat in the smartphone wars.

Google has gone as far as putting up a product page for the pair ahead of the event. Cribbing from Gregs writeup of the initial announcement here:

A recent leak has offered up a bit more info on their camera system two rear-facing on the 6 and three on the Pro. Theyll both feature a 50-megapixel wide-angle and a 12-megapixel ultra-wide, while the Pro adds a 48-megapixel telephoto. That event is going down Tuesday at 10AM PT/1PM ET.

Image Credits: Brian Heater

Samsungs Wednesday event is the biggest question mark of the three which, given how Samsung products tend to leak, is not something we get to say much. The new foldables were recently announced and we dont expect another Galaxy S device until around MWC in February/March of next year. A PC or tablet seems to be a reasonable guess. Though the bright colors in the invite could offer another clue. That event kicks off at 7AM PT/10AM ET on Wednesday.

Continued here:

What to expect from Apple, Google and Samsungs big events - TechCrunch

Worried about what might happen to your Google account data when you pass away? Well, the software giant has a feature which lets you decide the same. If you are using all the services of Google such as Gmail, Maps, Search and Photos, then it means that the Google account has plenty of data about you and your habits.

Some might have saved bank cards details or might be using Google Photos to preserve memories with your friends and family. Some of you might also be using Google Pay and might have stored a few important documents on Google Drive. So, it is important to create a plan for your Google account data as you might want to share everything with someone who can take care of this after you pass away.

When you dont use your Google account for a very long time or when the company detects no activity in your account, it then becomes inactive. However, the company lets you decide when it should consider your account to be inactive and what should happen with your data afterwards.

The search giant gives users an option to share the account and its data with someone that they trust. Or they can even ask Google to delete it if the account becomes inactive. The search giant says we will only trigger the plan that you set up if you havent used your Google Account for some time. Tell us how long we should wait before we do so.

The good thing is Google also allows users to set additional waiting time period for the account to be considered inactive. You can choose up to a maximum of 18 months. Users can simply visit the myaccount.google.com/inactive site and makes changes.

#You will first be required to enter the waiting time period for inactivity, email id, phone number and other details.

#After that, Google will give you the option to choose up to 10 people whom you want to notify when your Google Account becomes inactive and that you are no longer using this account. You can also give them access to some of your data and an option to download it. You will be asked to enter the email id of your trusted contacts.

Note: Those who use Gmail will also be able to set up an AutoReply that will be sent after your account becomes inactive.

#If you dont want anyone to get access your Google account data, then you dont need to add the email ids of anyone. But, this will mean that your data will get deleted and no one will ever be able to restore it after your is inactive.

#When you add a persons email id, Google displays a big list and asks you to choose what all data you want to share with your contact. The list includes Google Pay, Google Photos, Google Chat, location history and everything else that you have done using Google account. The company says that your trusted contact will have access for only three months after your Google Account becomes inactive.

Google says Theyll receive an email with a subject line and content that you wrote during setup. Well add a footer to that email, explaining that youve instructed Google to send an email on your behalf after youve stopped using your account.

#If you choose to delete your Google Account, then the search giant will delete all your data, including your publicly shared data like YouTube videos, and other content. Those who choose to share data with their trusted contacts, the email will contain a list of the data you have chosen to share.

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What happens to your Google data after you die? Here is the answer - The Indian Express

Honor promised Google Services will arrive to its devices by the end of this year, and we finally know which will be the first one on the market. According to the official Twitter account of the company, it will be the Honor 50, scheduled for a launch in Europe on October 26.

The Honor 50 smartphone helped the brand climb back to the third-biggest smartphone seller in China, and the company is probably hoping for similar success in the Old Continent. However, while domestic fans got to experience both the Honor 50 and Honor 50 Pro, it appears only the former will be available overseas.

The vanilla smartphone is still a solid choice for anyone wanting a solidly performing smartphone with a great camera setup. It has a Snapdragon 778G chipset with 5G capabilities, Android 11 with GMS, a 108MP main camera and a 32MP front-facing shooter. The battery has 4,300mAh capacity and support for 67W blazing fast charging, which is advertised to go from 0 to 70% in just 20 minutes.

Source | Via

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Honor 50 confirmed to be the first phone with Google Mobile Services for newly independent brand - GSMArena.com news - GSMArena.com

Google has warned of a surge in activity by government-backed hackers this year, including attacks from an Iranian group whose targets included a UK university.

The search group said that so far in 2021 it had sent more than 50,000 warnings to account holders that they had been a target of government-backed phishing or malware attempts. This represents an increase of a third on the same period last year, Google said in a blogpost, with the rise attributed to an unusually large campaign by a Russian hacking group known as APT28, or Fancy Bear.

However, the Google post focused on a group linked to Irans Revolutionary Guards, known as APT35, or Charming Kitten, which regularly conducts phishing attacks where, for instance, an email is used to trick someone into handing over sensitive information or to install malware.

This is the one of the groups we disrupted during the 2020 US election cycle for its targeting of campaign staffers, wrote Ajax Bash, from Googles threat analysis group. For years this group has hijacked accounts, deployed malware, and used novel techniques to conduct espionage aligned with the interests of the Iranian government.

In one attack in early 2021, APT35 attacked a website affiliated with a UK university using a tried and tested technique: directing users to a compromised webpage where they were encouraged to log in via their email service provider Gmail, Hotmail or Yahoo for instance in order to view a webinar. Users were also asked for second-factor authentication codes, which go straight to APT35.

Google did not name the UK university but in July it was reported that the School of Oriental and African Studies (Soas), University of London, had been targeted by APT35 in early 2021. The attack started with a fake email from a Soas academic inviting people to a webinar, starting a chain of interactions that led to a dummy page on the universitys radio website that tricked the phishing victims into handing over their email user names and passwords. Soas said in July the attack had not accessed personal information or data.

Once we became aware of the dummy site earlier this year, we immediately remedied and reported the breach in the normal way. We have reviewed how this took place and taken steps to further improve protection of these peripheral systems, Soas said.

Referring to the UK university attack, Bash said: APT35 has relied on this technique since 2017 targeting high-value accounts in government, academia, journalism, NGOs, foreign policy and national security. Credential phishing through a compromised website demonstrates these attackers will go to great lengths to appear legitimate as they know its difficult for users to detect this kind of attack.

The blogpost details other forms of attack by APT35. These include: attempting to upload spyware to the Google Play store, where Android phone users can buy apps; impersonating conference officials to conduct phishing attacks; and using a bot on the Telegram messaging service to notify when users have entered a phishing site, although Google said Telegram had since tackled that ruse.

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Google warns of surge in activity by state-backed hackers - The Guardian

Today at Google Cloud Next, the companys annual customer conference, Google announced a broad portfolio of hybrid cloud services designed to deliver computing at the edge of Googles network of data centers, in a partner facility or in a customers private data center all managed by Anthos, the companys cloud native management console.

Theres a lot to unpack here, but Sachin Gupta, Googles GM and VP of Product for IaaS, says the strategy behind the announcement was to bring customers along who might have specialized workloads that arent necessarily well suited to the public cloud a need that he says they were continually hearing about from potential customers.

That means providing them with some reasonable alternatives. What we find is that there are various factors that prevent customers from moving to the public cloud right away, Gupta said. For instance, they might have low latency requirements or large amounts of data that they need to process and moving this data to the public cloud and back again may not be efficient. They also may have security, privacy, data residency or other compliance requirements.

All of this led Google to design a set of solutions that work in a variety of situations that might not involve the pure public cloud. A solution could be installed on the edge in one of Googles worldwide data centers, in a partner data center like a telco or a colo facility like Equinix, or as part of a managed server inside a companys own data center.

With that latter component, its important to note that these are servers from partner companies like Dell and HPE, as opposed to a server manufactured and managed by Google as Amazon does with its Outposts product. Its also interesting to note that these machines wont be connected directly to the Google cloud in any way, but Google will manage all of the software and provide a way for IT to manage cloud and on-prem resources in a single way. More on that in a moment.

The goal with a hosted solution is a consistent and modern approach to computing using either containers and Kubernetes or virtual machines. Google provides updates via a secure download site and customers can check these themselves or let a third party vendor handle all of that for them.

The glue here that really holds this approach together is Anthos, the control software the company introduced a couple of years ago. With Anthos, customers can control and manage software wherever it lives, whether thats on premise, in a data center or on public clouds, even from competitors like Microsoft and Amazon.

Google Cloud hybrid portfolio architecture diagram Image Credits: Google Cloud

The whole approach signals that Google is attempting to carve out its own share of the cloud by taking advantage of a hybrid market opening. While this is an area that both Microsoft and IBM are also trying to exploit, taking this comprehensive platform approach while using Anthos to stitch everything together could give Google some traction, especially in companies that have specific requirements that prevent them from moving certain workloads to the cloud.

Google reached 10% market share in the cloud infrastructure market for the first time in the most recent quarterly report from August with a brisk growth rate of 54%, showing that they are starting to gain a bit of momentum, even though they remain far behind Amazon with 33% and Microsoft with 20% market share.

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Google goes all in on hybrid cloud with new portfolio of edge and managed on-prem solutions - TechCrunch

Googles Arts & Culture team launched its Pocket Gallery experiences in 2018 to allow AR-enabled smartphone users to view artwork from artists like Johannes Vermeer for the first time in history, including pieces that are usually inaccessible publicly. Today, the team announced that its making the entire series of Pocket Galleries available to anyone on the web.

The companys original goal with Pocket Galleries was to digitally bring never-before-seen exhibitions straight to users in a 3D format. The new web expansion means that the galleries can now be viewed on desktop and on smartphones with or without AR capabilities, bringing even more visibility to the exhibitions.

Simply open your favorite browser to discover all our Pocket Galleries in 3D. Take an art tour of the world in sound, go spelunking among some of the oldest paintings known to man at Chauvet Cave, marvel at miniatures scenes from ancient India, or discover the man of contradictions in Klimt vs. Klimt, Joe Shepherd, the associate product manager at Google Arts & Culture, said in a blog post.

Users are now able to read about the history of certain artifacts and closely examine specific details in several artworks. In some galleries, an audio tour will guide users through the highlights of the exhibitions to offer historical context and other details.

Image Credits: Google

Google is also introducing a new exhibition to the collection in collaboration with Runion des muses nationaux Grand Palais (Rmn-GP) in France. Users can now take a virtual guided tour to discover maritime tales, stormy landscapes, and shores swathed in light. The exhibition includes 40 marine masterpieces from the collections of the Palace of Versailles, the Louvre and other prominent European museums.

We hope youll enjoy uncovering maritime mysteries through our latest gallery, and experiencing our full collection of cultural curiosities from the new perspective of Pocket Galleries on the web, Shepherd said.

To view the Pocket Galleries exhibitions, you can visit the Google Arts & Culture website or download the Google Arts & Culture app for Android or iOS.

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Google brings its 3D Pocket Gallery art exhibition experiences to the web - TechCrunch