Kiran Upadhyay

The 92nd annual White House Christmas tree lighting ceremony is getting a tech twist this year. Over 300,000 people, mostly young girls, participated in Google’s Made with Code campaign to program the way the lights will dance on the 56 official White House Christmas trees during this evening’s lighting ceremony. We don’t know what exactly 300,000 different lighting programs will look like until the actual event tonight. You can watch it live on the official White House YouTube channel at 5 pm EST. Brittany Wenger, 20, is one of 10 chosen to go and participate in the ceremony tonight. Those in the program range in age from 4 to 20, but most are in their teens or tweens. Wenger says each girls’ code has a very specific time, down to the “exact second.” She tried to describe how her code will look when it’s time to shine. “Mine kind of starts out blue and turns into a greenish thing and goes like a funnel,” she explained. Wenger is a student at Duke University and an ambassado

Google today announced that its Cloud Platform is now in compliance with the Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standards (DSS). This means developers can now hold, process and exchange credit card information from branded credit cards on Google’s cloud computing platform without running afoul of existing regulations. Until now, Google advised its users that its cloud service wasn’t meant to process or store credit card information. It’s important to remember that just because Google is now compliant, developers can’t just suddenly store all of this information on Google’s servers. It does mean, however, that developers can now use Google’s platform to build their own compliant solutions. Google’s reference customer for today’s news is WePay (which also today announced that it is using Google as its public cloud provider). “Google Cloud Platform will enable WePay to process our partners’ transactions in a fully scalable, highly available environment with robust security fe

Are you still trying to get an invite to Google’s Inbox? Did you miss that massive invite-spree last month, where everyone who asked nicely got an invite? Fear not! They’re doing it again. If you still need an invite, Google is doing the happy-hour thing again this afternoon. [Update: the happy hour window is now over. You can still try the below steps, but your email might go ignored.] How to get in: Compose an email from a Gmail address (but, sadly, not a Gmail For Work address. Those still don’t work.) Send it to inbox@google.com between 10 am and noon pacific today. Tada! Last time this happened, the onslaught of emails hit Google so hard that their mailbox actually started rejecting emails, resulting in Google extending the spree for a little while longer than planned. No guarantees that’ll happen this time, so be quick if you want in. Via

Google’s recently released Android 5.0 mobile operating system is currently running on fewer than 0.1 percent of handsets, according to data released by the company. The new software, code-named ‘Lollipop,’ was made generally available November 12. Carriers are currently rolling Lollipop out to consumers, according to their own schedule. The limited uptake of Android’s fifth version so far underscores a wider problem in the mobile world: Fragmentation. It took Windows Phone 8.1, for example, nearly half a year to make it to the 50 percent market share mark. And as Wired notes, Apple is seeing slower adoption of its new iOS 8 than some expected. Current reports indicate that Lollipop is seeing increasing over-the-air updates, which could quickly push its market share numbers higher. Google was not immediately available to comment on the current Lollipop figures. However, even if Lollipop manages to grow its share of the Android install base through the end of the year, it will l

Google continues to build out its lineup of content partners for the Chromecast streaming media device. This time, partners include Comedy Central, Sesame Street Go, Nickelodeon, and TuneIn, providing a good mix of comedy, kids and radio/podcast content for direct broadcast to your TV or display. Other new channels include EPIX, YuppTV and Encore, which add additional TV and movie content, including live broadcast Indian television, and U.S. blockbusters. The new apps debuting today should help make Chromecast an even better companion for Thanksgiving gatherings, offering up something for the family to gather around while waiting on that turkey to brown. It’s interesting to see some content partners, like TuneIn, debut on Android TV first and then make their way to the Chromecast later. Casting functionality is a different approach to the native, local software available on Android TV, but media providers testing both models will be able to shed more light on what stands the most

Google today announced the alpha launch of Google Container Engine, a new managed service for building and running Docker container-based applications on its cloud platform. Docker is probably the hottest technology in developer circles these days — it’s almost impossible to have a discussion with a developer without it coming up — and Google’s Cloud Platform team has decided to go all in on this technology that makes it easier for developers to run distributed applications. In essence, this new service is a “Cluster-as-a-Service” platform based on Google’s open source Kubernetes project. Kubernetes, which helps developers manage their container clusters, is based on Google’s own work with containers in its massive data centers. In this new service, Kubernetes dynamically manages the different Docker containers that make up an application for the user. Google says the combination of “fast booting, efficient VM hosts and seamless virtualized network integration” will make its cl

Google is expanding its Inbox invite program, having issued another collection of invites to existing members already today, with a new ‘Happy Hour’ taking place between 3 p.m. PT and 4 p.m. PT today. If users email them at inbox@google.com asking for an invite during that window, they’ll get access guaranteed by 5 p.m. PT today. If you’re still waiting for access, this is the most certain method yet for locking in an invite. Keep in mind that only personal Gmail accounts can access the Inbox while in beta, so even if your work email is run through Google Apps, you won’t be able to sign up, at least for the time being. Google’s Inbox is the app that has proven the most interesting for me thus far in terms of non-traditional email software, after other entrants including Mailbox failed to really light a fire in my belly. The app benefits by machine learning smarts that Google began developing and honed using its smart Categories feature for standard Gmail, and in its Google Now i

As Greg Kumparak noted in the TechCrunch review of the Nexus 6, the phone is very large. Too large, in fact, for most humans. Back when it was just a rumor that Google would be picking Motorola to provide the Nexus 6 hardware, and that it would indeed be a monster with a 6-inch display, I lamented the phabletization of the Nexus line before it was even a real thing. Now, I’ve had some time with the device, and while part of me still feels the same, another part has to acknowledge that Google may have gotten it right with a “go big or go home” strategy for this generation of hardware. For me, and for just about any other everyday user of the Nexus 6, there’s no question that something more akin to the Nexus 5, albeit with just better battery life, a better camera, improved specs and an updated display would’ve been the preferable option. Not least because such an unexciting iteration would probably have been able to keep the cost down, meaning you’d have another great pure Android o

A couple of years ago, right around the time Google’s Gmail team decided to start working on a standalone email app — the recently announced Inbox — a major redesign of Gmail was launched. As is the case with all Google products it was first released internally as “dogfood” to let Googlers themselves digest all the new features, or as was the case with this particular redesign, the removal of most of the advanced features. The Gmail team did not have to wait for the reaction for long. And it wasn’t very “googly.” It caused an uproar teeming with disgust for just about every decision the Gmail product/design team made. Phrases like, “You guys just completely destroyed Gmail!” and “What are these crazy designers doing over there?!” were everywhere. From being spoken at many of Google’s cafes to every internal online forum. Google engineers, in typical OCD engineer fashion, wrote long internal Google+ and forum posts detailing every single use case that was no longer supported, no m

Just over 18 months ago Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said he found having to talk to Google Glass out loud “the weirdest thing” and admitted that there would be “places where Google Glass are inappropriate.” Well, hello! I think the average person could have told Google this long before they spent millions developing the thing, and as I wrote at the time, the product was simply incapable of becoming a mass-market device. I predicted it would become this era’s Segway: hyped as a game changer but ultimately used by warehouse workers and mall cops. Indeed, Glass might well be our surveillance era’s perfect pairing. Now Reuters has uncovered clear evidence that app developers are dropping the device. Nine of the 16 app Glass app makers that Reuters contacted admitted they’d abandoned their efforts. Meanwhile, “The Glass Collective,” a venture fund backing Glass apps has gone and now redirects to the Glass page, while three of Google’s key employees on the Glass team have departed.

Google is literally hitting the road to promote the potential of the internet in Bangladesh. The company today launched ‘Google Bus Bangladesh’, an educational program aimed at teaching key digital skills to more than half a million students in the South Asian country. There are some outlandish programs to help connect the world’s population — including Google’s balloons, SpaceX’s forthcoming satellites, and Facebook’s drones – but Google is going back to basics with this roadshow across the world’s eighth most populated country. It plans to visit some 500 educational campuses across 35 locations over the next 12 months, bringing with it instructors who can teach students about important tools to help them make the most of the internet. In addition to tutors, students involved in the project will be able to get hands-on with a number of internet-connected Android devices. Google tells us that the hardware will be entry-level devices from Symphony, like the $70 Xplorer W65i. Ther

At a recent event on its Redmond campus, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella detailed his views on what Google and Apple do best. His comments, as the chief executive of the company worth less than Apple, but more than Google, are notable. For context, in his thus-short tenure at Microsoft , Nadella has completed its purchase of Nokia, and also continued the company’s push into cloud computing. Here’s Nadella’s quote on his rivals: When I think about what Apple does, what Google does and what Microsoft does, therein lies perhaps the simplest answer to why these three identities are actually pretty distinct. To me Apple’s very, very clear, and, in fact, I think Tim Cook did a great job of even describing that very recently where he said they sell devices and that’s what Apple is all about. And Google is about being, it’s about data or it’s about advertising, it is about serving you ads in a tasteful way, and they’ve done a great job of that business. Apple’s massive success in hardwa

After years of using Moffett Field as the home and launch pad for the private jets of Google’s founders, the company has agreed to a deal in which it will lease the airfield from NASA for the next 60 years. As part of the lease, Google will take over operations of the airfield while the U.S. government retains ownership of the land. In a press release, NASA announced that Planetary Ventures LLC, a shell organization operated by Google for real estate deals, will contribute $1.16 billion over the course of the lease, while reducing the government agency’s maintenance and operation costs by $6.3 million annually. The best part of the press release is this quote from NASA Administrator Charles Bolden: “As NASA expands its presence in space, we are making strides to reduce our footprint here on Earth,” he says. NASA and the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) will continue to own the 1,000 acres of land in Mountain View, Calif., which includes Hangars One, Two, and Three, a

Earlier this year at its I/O developer conference, Google quietly announced plans for supporting its Dart Programming language on App Engine. It’s taken a bit longer than many expected, but starting today, developers can run their Dart server-side application on Google App Engine’s Manage VMs. Dart is often seen as Google’s answer to JavaScript and, hence, mostly meant to run in the browser. But as Lars Bak and Kasper Lund, the inventors of Dart, told me back at I/O, the idea behind Dart was always to create a general purpose programming language. Using Docker, developers were already able to deploy Dart on Google Compute Engine. App Engine, however, gives developers easier access to a wider range of features out of the box, including Google’s Data Store and caching services, as well as monitoring and logging tools. All developers have to do — besides write their Dart apps — is upload their applications and App Engine will handle scaling and data storage as needed. It can even

Slack, the enterprise collaboration platform co-founded by Stewart Butterfield, today confirmed that it has closed a $120 million round of funding, co-led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Google Ventures with the participation of past investors including A16Z, Accel Partners and The Social+Capital Partnership. We first reported on this fundraise last week. The valuation is at $1.12 billion, post-money. The company has now raised $180 million in total — an astounding amount if you consider that it only came out of beta earlier this year, but less so when you consider some of the traction that it has picked up in that time: The company says it now has 30,000 active teams teams who send over 200 million messages each month, with more than 73,000 of the daily active users registered as paid seats. From what I understand the company has done a solid job in converting users from free to premium tiers — the paid tiers essentially give employees more capacity on the platfor

Google will begin rolling out a change to its search algorithm that the media giant says will "visibly affect" rankings of piracy sites globally. The Mountain View, California company promised to do this in 2012. But at the time, the Recording Industry Association of America, the Motion Picture Association of America, and others said the changes to its search algorithm had "no demonstrable impact on demoting sites with large amounts of piracy." Google said the latest global algorithm changes, to roll out this week, will work. “In August 2012 we first announced that we would downrank sites for which we received a large number of valid DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] notices,” Google’s senior copyright counsel Katherine Oyama wrote in a Friday blog post. “We’ve now refined the signal in ways we expect to visibly affect the rankings of some of the most notorious sites." The announcement of the algorithm update came as Google unveiled its latest &q

It’s been a few weeks since we’ve heard much about Project Ara, Google’s effort to build a phone out of components that can be swapped out, piece-by-piece. Google showed off the device a bit back at I/O and, alas, things got a bit crashy during the presentation. In a new video released today, the Phonebloks team shows the Ara prototype in its most recent form — and it’s working! It looks a bit slow right now, sure — but it boots! The best look at the device in its current state comes at around the 2:30 mark. So what’s changed? Outside of the fact that it looks like the device actually boots and can be operated to some degree, not a lot — at least not from the outside. Particularly worth noting, however, is the tidbit they drop at the tail end of the video: currently, about 50 percent of the available space on this first prototype (“Spiral 1″) is dedicated to just making the modularity possible. In the next prototype (“Spiral 2″), however, they’ve freed up a ton of space

Need to make an international phone call, but don’t want to deal with the mystery connection fees and huge minute-by-minute charges? Google has just quietly launched a rather nifty new feature: free international calling to 25 different countries through Hangouts/Gmail/Google+. The catch, if you want to call it that: only the first 60 seconds are free. After you burn through that first minute, it’ll go back to costing a few cents per minute. One other weird bit: according to Google’s instructions on how to make this work, you’ll need to have some calling credit on your Google account (presumably for them to charge if you go over the 60-second limit.) On the (huge) upside, the account being pre-paid means no massive surprise charges. 60 seconds, or just enough time to say “Hey, man — you’re not online. Get on [insert your favorite free Voice Over IP service here] so we can talk for more than 60 seconds.” The countries that can be called for a minute on the house: Australi

Android’s newest update is coming soon, with devices running 5.0 Lollipop beginning to ship November 3. While the visual update might be the one that most users pay the most attention to, Android 5.0 also has a number of under-the-hood changes, including some major updates to the overall security of the platform. Google has put a lot of effort into addressing the biggest threats to Android user security, which still overwhelmingly represent lost or stolen devices, and today the company is detailing a few of these efforts. Lollipop adds some new lock methods that make it easier to keep your device secure, which is a huge boon to the overall integrity of the platform. The biggest roadblock to mobile device security is actually user apathy, which sees people skipping basic security practices like implementing a lock screen pin code because it’s inconvenient when you’re checking your device every few minutes. Lollipop offers Smart Lock to help address this, which uses paired devices t

Google has released its Fit app, which acts as a central storehouse for activity recorded via your Android device, and via apps that use the Google Fit SDK introduced at the I/O developer conference back in June. The dedicated Android app is pretty spare, but it provides a way for users to see an overview of their collected health and fitness data in one central location. The Google Fit app doesn’t present me with much as of right now, but it uses your device’s sensors to tracking walking and other activity, and you can manually enter information about workouts not tracked, or your height and weight. Heart rate info from compatible devices, including Android Wear smartwatches, are also fed to the app. In short, it’s a competitor to Apple’s Health application, but with a very different approach to UI that appears to want to aim for simplicity above all else. Google Fit also has a web-based destination at Google.com/fit which doesn’t appear to be live just yet, and it’s likely we’