Kiran Upadhyay

Detecting cancer could be as easy as popping a pill in the near future. Google’s head of life sciences, Andrew Conrad, took to the stage at the Wall Street Journal Digital conference to reveal that the tech giant’s secretive Google[x] lab has been working on a wearable device that couples with nanotechnology to detect disease within the body. “We’re passionate about switching from reactive to proactive and we’re trying to provide the tools that make that feasible,” explained Conrad. This is a third project in a series of health initiatives for Google[x]. The team has already developed a smart contact lens that detects glucose levels for diabetics and utensils that help manage hand tremors in Parkinson’s patients. The plan is to test whether tiny particles coated “magnetized” with antibodies can catch disease in its nascent stages. The tiny particles are essentially programmed to spread throughout the body via pill and then latch on to the abnormal cells. The wearable device then

Earlier this year Google acquired DeepMind in the UK to expand the work that it is doing in artificial intelligence, and today the company announced that it is making some more significant moves to build this out even further. It is acqui-hiring the two academic teams of founders, seven people in all, behind Dark Blue Labs and Vision Factory, two deep learning startups based in the UK, and it is also partnering with Oxford University, which had spun out the two startups, to build out wider research efforts further in the area of AI. The Oxford partnership will be coming with a “substantial donation”, according to a blog post announcing the news from Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind and VP of engineering at Google. It will also see at least some of the people behind Dark Blue Labs and Vision Factory continue to lecture and research at the university. We are reaching out to Google to see if we can get a more specific figure for the Oxford investment and also for the acquis

On the heels of acquiring satellite startup Skybox in August, Google and Skybox have announced the Skybox for Good program, which will provide real-time satellite imagery to organizations and programs that save lives, protect the environment, promote education and positively impact humanity, according to the official blog post. The program launches today in beta with a small group of partners. The images provided to these organizations will be publicly available under a Creative Commons license. This will allow organizations like Sky Truth and Appalachian Voices to keep an eye on “mountain-top removal mining,” which threatens to devastate the forests of the Appalachian Mountains in West Virginia. Another example given in the announcement was images of a Northern Sri Lanka village called Nagarkovil, which were given to HALO to help them verify that the area was safe, after previously removing land mines. The initiative comes from the Google Earth Outreach team, the main goal be

HP had 317,000 employees as of October 2013. The company got rid of 36,000 people by July of this year. HP was planning total "employee reductions" of 45,000 to 50,000 people, but it will now push that to 55,000 "to fund investment opportunities in R&D and sales," the company said in a presentation for investors today. HP plans to break into two by the end of October 2015. One of the new, separate companies will be Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, focusing on "servers, storage, networking, converged systems, services and software as well as its OpenStack Helion cloud platform," HP said. HP CEO Meg Whitman will be CEO of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. HP's personal systems and printing businesses will become HP Inc. and have "a strong roadmap into the most exciting new technologies like 3D printing and new computing experiences," HP said. Dion Weisler, executive VP of the printing and personal systems division, will be HP Inc. CEO. Whitman wi

When Google+ head Vic Gundotra abruptly left Google earlier this year, it quickly led to rumors that Google would be scaling back its ambitions for the social network and cutting the division's resources. In an interview with Re/code today, new head of social media Dave Besbris said that the Google+ team is still going strong, and the service won't be going anywhere anytime soon. “We’re the largest we’ve ever been,” Besbris told Re/code. "We’re actually very happy with the progress of Google+, [Larry Page] said this at the time that Vic transitioned that he’s going to continue working on building this stuff, that he’s very happy with it. The company is behind it." The full interview is worth a read—while Besbris didn't give surprising answers to any of the questions asked, he did talk about Google+'s ad policy and the challenges of battling peoples' "pre-conceived notions" about the social network. He also attempted to reassure those who fee

Google has introduced a new email app, from the same team that builds Gmail, but intended as something completely different from Gmail. Inbox is the app, and it looks like it might owe some inspiration to Mailbox, and to Google Now. The new Inbox app is available to a limited user group only, and will be expanding its user pool via an invite system similar to the one that Google used for Gmail. It is available cross-platform, however, as an app for iOS, web and Android. You can also email Google at inbox@google.com to request access, if you don’t like your chances of getting an invite from a friend. What Inbox does differently than Gmail is present you with your information in a way that’s aimed at making content contextually relevant, instead of just presented as it comes in. Email’s evolution has resulted in an unwieldy system – what began as system for occasional correspondence from a single virtual location is now something with take with us everywhere, with a volume that ca

Google Sheets, the company’s online spreadsheet, is getting quite a bit smarter today with the launch of the Smart Autofill add-on. Smart Autofill can look at the existing values in a spreadsheet and then, with the help of the Google Prediction API, automatically divine the data for missing values in a column. Essentially, the algorithm learns as much as it can about the information that is already available in a spreadsheet and then it looks for patterns to build a model based on this information. Say you have a spreadsheet with a number of data points about vehicles (this is Google’s default example). Maybe you have pricing for some, but not for all. Google will look at the data in the spreadsheet and then try to predict the right values for the missing prices. Or maybe you are slightly OCD and keep a spreadsheet for the restaurants you visit with data about their cuisine, ambiance, cost and other data. Now when you add a new place, Google will try to predict how much you wil

According to Edward Snowden, people who care about their privacy should stay away from popular consumer Internet services like Dropbox, Facebook, and Google. Snowden conducted a remote interview today as part of the New Yorker Festival, where he was asked a couple of variants on the question of what we can do to protect our privacy. His first answer called for a reform of government policies. Some people take the position that they “don’t have anything to hide,” but he argued that when you say that, “You’re inverting the model of responsibility for how rights work”: When you say, ‘I have nothing to hide,’ you’re saying, ‘I don’t care about this right.’ You’re saying, ‘I don’t have this right, because I’ve got to the point where I have to justify it.’ The way rights work is, the government has to justify its intrusion into your rights. He added that on an individual level, people should seek out encrypted tools and stop using services that are “hostile to privacy.” For one th

Google has rolled out a new iPhone app called Primer, aimed at teaching startups the fundamentals of marketing – with a Google spin, of course. The new app, available only on iOS for now, but coming soon to Android, complements the Google Primer website which further explains how the mini-marketing lessons Google provides overlaps with the company’s larger agenda. “We realized that some of the Google ad-tech products which connect businesses to customers also widen the gap between rookies and marketing pros,” the website explains. “We want to fix this.” Instead of simplifying its ad-tech offerings for those so-called “rookies,” Primer instead is focused on getting would-be marketers up to speed by offering straightforward marketing lessons, case studies, and quizzes that teach “big picture strategy.” The content is co-developed between Google and industry experts in each category, the company says. On mobile, the app offers a handful of topics including, at launch, Search Engi

Google took to the sands to expand its globe-spanning Street View imagery, using its Trekker camera pack modified and mounted to an actual camel’s hump to capture photos from the Liwa Desert, a pristine wonderland straight out of fantasy tales in the United Arab Emirates. The use of camels was meant to avoid having any kind of impact on the surrounding environment, which has played home to human settlers since the Late Stone Age. The Trekker pack is what Google uses to capture Street View imagery where its cars can’t or shouldn’t tread – though traditionally, they’re worn and carried by human hosts, not dromedaries. Google has previously used the Trekker to map the Grand Canyon, the wild northland of Canada, and many other destinations. At its I/O developer conference in 2013, we went ‘backs-on’ with the kit to see what it’s like, and the camels shouldn’t have much trouble with the load. This project from Google reveals some stunning imagery and sweeping vistas from a place many

Google’s Scott Jenson, an interaction and UX designer who left the company only to return to the Chrome team last November, has revealed a project underway at the company called The Physical Web to provide “interaction on demand” so that people can walk up and use any smart devices without the need for intervening mobile apps. This would make it possible for users to simply walk up to a bus stop and receive the time until the next arriving bus, without any additional software needed. The project is an ambitious bet on the future of smart devices. Analysts are predicting explosions in connected devices over the next few years, with Cisco anticipating 50 billion Internet-connected gadgets in action by 2020, and Intel pegging the total at 15 billion by just next year. Google’s project, spearheaded by Jenson, would make it much easier for people to interact with the growing web of connected devices every day. “People should be able to walk up to any smart device – a vending machine,

Students whose school use Google Apps for Education will soon be able to store as many files in their Google Drive folders as they like. Earlier this year, Google launched Drive for Work, its premium $10/month version of Google Drive with unlimited storage and a couple of additional enterprise features. Today, the company announced that is bringing unlimited storage to Google Apps for Education soon, too, with the launch of Drive for Education. Individual files can measure up to 5TB, which should be more than enough for most legitimate use cases. Just like the rest of the Google Apps for Education suite, Drive for Education is available free of charge for all non-profit educational institutions (and there are no ads either). As a Google spokesperson told me, Drive for Education will automatically become available to all Google Apps for Education users over the coming weeks. This is a slow rollout, however, and it will be a few weeks before it reaches all users. Before the en

Google has a new Nexus 6 in the works, also potentially dubbed the “Nexus X,” and rumors abound about its potential specs. But 9to5Google has what might be the clearest look yet at this next iteration of Google’s Android reference smartphone, and the good news is that it’s basically a new Moto X. There’s bad news, too, however, depending on your opinion regarding phablets. The new report says that rumors of a 5.92-inch screen are in fact true, meaning it’s the new Moto X, but scaled up. For me, that’s sad, because after playing with the new Moto X for a short time, the only thing I really felt it could use was the display size from the original. This 5.92-inch diagonal monster display will have 2560×1440 resolution, which would make for a chart-busting 498 ppi pixel density. It’ll be powered by a 3,200 mAh battery pack, which should provide decent device life, even with a good portion of that power being used to make sure the huge screen delivers eye-pleasing imagery. 9to5’s spe

Samsung loves "big." Its phones are big, its advertising budget is big, and as you'll see below, its employee headcount is really big, too. Samsung has more employees than Apple, Google, and Microsoft combined. We dug through everyone's 10-K (or equivalent) SEC filings and came up with this: At 275,000 employees, Samsung (just Samsung Electronics) is the size of five Googles! This explains Samsung's machine-gun-style device output; the company has released around 46 smartphones and 27 tablets just in 2014. If we wanted to, we could cut these numbers down some more. Google is going to shed 3,894 employees once it finally gets rid of Motorola. Over half of Apple's headcount—42,800 employees—is from the retail division, putting the non-retail part of the company at only 37,500 employees. The "Sony" on this chart only means "Sony Electronics," the part of the company that is most comparable to Samsung Electronics. Sony Group has a ma

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt today said it was a “mistake” to support the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group that has said human-created climate change could be “beneficial” and opposes environmental regulations. Schmidt said groups trying to cast doubt on climate change science are "just literally lying." Google’s membership in ALEC has been criticized because of the group’s stance on climate change and its opposition to network neutrality rules and municipal broadband. Earlier this month, Google refused to comment after 50 advocacy groups called on the company to end its affiliation with ALEC. That changed today when Schmidt appeared on The Diane Rehm Show and was asked by a listener whether Google is still supporting ALEC. The listener described ALEC as “lobbyists in DC that are funding climate change deniers.” Schmidt responded, “we funded them as part of a political campaign for something unrelated. I think the consensus within the co

Google bought Skybox Imaging for $500 million, and the micro-satellite company’s most recent mission was…to take photos of Burning Man. Skybox repeatedly flew its satellites over Burning Man to create GIFs of how the 70,000 person make-shift hippie city was assembled and then deconstructed over three weeks. For example, above you’ll see the whole city rise and fall, and below you can see the massive “Man” effigy being errected through August, and then the ashy debris on September 1st after it was burnt. Jokes aside, the GIFs actually prove Skybox’s big advantage over other satellite companies. Since its micro-satellites are much smaller and therefore cheaper, so it can more of them up in space than companies building big, expensive, traditional satellites that power the infrequent updates to products like Google Maps. One of those might have missed the ephemeral Burning Man event entirely. But since Skybox had both its SkySat-1 and SkySat-2 photographing the festival of expres

If you are an early stage startup, Google wants to give you $100,000 in Cloud Platform credits for one year so you can host your applications on its servers (and not on AWS or Azure). This offer is part of Google’s Cloud Platform for Startups initiative, a new program the company’s senior vice president for its technical infrastructure Urs Hölzle announced at the Google for Entrepreneurs Global Partner Summit today. To be eligible for this program, startups must be less than five years old and have less than $500,000 in annual revenue. They must also be part of one of 50 accelerator programs, incubators and VC funds around the world that Google has already partnered with (Google plans to add more partners over time and those organizations that aren’t part of this first batch can contact Google to join this program). Among these partners are the likes of Y Combinator, 500 Startups, SV Angel, Techstars, Code for America, Chicago’s 1871, and (unsurprisingly) Google’s own Google Ven

For the last few years, it has always felt like Google Voice, the company’s VoIP calling solution, was on its way out. Instead, the video-centric Hangouts was getting all of the attention. But fret not, Google tells me that it is “growing its investment in Google Voice” and starting today, it will integrate Voice and Hangouts with the launch of its redesigned Hangouts apps for Android and iOS, as well as on the web. This new version of Hangouts is rolling out to all users over the next few days and the Google Voice features will be available shortly after. There are a couple of different aspects to the new mobile apps. The first thing you will notice is a different look that incorporates some of the features of Google Material Design. It’s all a bit brighter and simpler, but most importantly, the apps now feature a multi-tab layout that makes it easier to access your contacts, conversations and calls. What this update is really about, however, is voice calls. Hangouts was always

Google is selling the Glass Explorer Edition on its Play devices store, still for $1,500, with your choice of a free frame or sunglass shade in the mix. The Glass model listed is still very much Google’s experimental product, but the descriptions in the listing make it sound more like falling into the category of an “Explorer” is now more about how many extreme sports you’re involved in than how comfortable you are with alpha software builds. Putting Glass up on its devices storefront signals yet another widening of the availability of the wearable computer, after Google first opened up the program to everyone (instead of just those invited to participate) temporarily, and then permanently. By making it easier to find and acquire, Google is slowly broadening its potential user base for the devices, even if it isn’t making any claims about a consumer launch or taking the hardware out of beta. I remain skeptical about the future of Glass, and whether we’ll see it evolve into somet

Did you drop your shiny new(ish) Nexus 5 and wreck the screen? Don’t panic! Google has tweaked their stance on accidental damage a bit, and will now (probably) replace the handset for free — but there are a few catches. Word going around the rumor mill was that Google had suddenly instated a new policy regarding a replacements for Nexus handsets that had been accidentally damaged. The weird part? No one seemed to have confirmation from Google themselves on the matter. So we, you know, called Google and asked. Here’s what we learned: it’s not so much a “policy” as it is an “exception” that Google’s CS reps are allowed to make — so you probably don’t want to be a jerk about it when you call. Also, it doesn’t seem like every CS rep necessarily knows about this yet. Up until now, accidental damage — be it water damage or a shattered display — generally meant you’d foot the bill. A replacement screen, for example, would cost about $150 bucks (or about 42% of the cost of buying a n