Kiran Upadhyay

As rumored for months, Google has just announced plans to offer its own wireless cellular service. Here’s what we know so far: It’s called “Project Fi” It’s for Nexus 6 owners only, at first. It’s invite only right now. You can sign up for an invite here. It’s built on top of Sprint and T-Mobile’s networks No contracts Subscribers pay $20 for unlimited talk/text, and then pay $10 per gig of data. So a 3GB plan would be $30 on top of that $20, coming out to a total of $50. You only pay for what you use, but in sort of a strange way: if you pay for 3GB of data per month ($30) but only use 1.5GB, you’ll get $15 back at the end of the month. It’s all tied into Google Hangouts, which will allow you to place calls from your number on any Hangouts-enabled tablet or laptop in addition to your phone. WiFi Tethering is included. This is what their US Coverage map currently looks like (Montana gets basically no love):

Google has created a new Easter Egg for Google Maps (pretty much just in time for actual Easter) which lets you play Pac-Man in real-world locales on the company’s Maps apps for desktop and mobie devices. It’s easy to play, by either navigating to the Google Maps website or opening the app on your Android or iOS device, and then just searching for a location where Pac-Man might show up. Google is offering hints to help you find the iconic 1980s video game protagonist, but if you’re in a hurry just search for “times square” and you should see a pixelated map flag icon like the one pictured here. Click on that and you’ll launch into a game with simple controls, letting you control Pac-Man as he evades his ghostly enemies with either the arrow keys on a computer or by swiping up, down, left and right to change direction on mobile. Rack up a decent high score with your five lives and then share it with others to see how well you can Pac in the streets.

Most of us will never travel to the Khumbu region of Nepal, which is home to Mount Everest, but thanks to Google’s Street View, you can now get a better idea of what this part of the world looks like (and some Far Cry 4 players will find it looks quite familiar to them). Street View is probably the wrong name for Google’s latest effort here. It’s more like “Trail” View. Google partnered with Apa Sherpa, who holds the record for reaching the summit of Mount Everest more than anybody else (21 times!). Together with his Apa Sherpa Foundation and the Nepalese nonprofit Story Cycle, Google mapped and photographed the region on a 10-day expedition. In the process, Google created these new Street View images and improved its maps in the region. The closest to Mount Everest you will get on this virtual trek is Gorak Shep, but the team also gathered some indoor imagery from the Everest Summiteer Lodge, which was built by Apa Sherpa in 1996. Other interesting sights include a number of othe

Here’s a partnership that may come as a surprise to many: Microsoft and Google are working together to help make Angular 2 — the next (and somewhat controversial) version of Google’s JavaScript web app framework — better. Angular has been using its own AtScript superset of Microsoft’s TypeScript for a while now. TypeScript is Microsoft’s attempt at extending JavaScript with features like type annotations, generics and modules. Going forward, the two languages will converge. Angular 2 will be written in TypeScript and developers will be able to write their Angular 2 applications in this language,too. The AtScript language made its debut last October, but it looks like the AtScript name will be retired in favor of TypeScript. Angular, at various times in its development, was written in plain JavaScript, Google’s own Dart language and AtScript (there are still separate Dart and JavaScript versions of Angular 1.x today). AtScript added features like introspection, as well as field

Google has built an artificial intelligence system that can learn – and become amazing at – video games all on its own, given no commands but a simple instruction to play titles. The project, detailed by Bloomberg, is the result of research from the London-based DeepMind AI startup Google acquired in a deal last year, and involves 49 games from the Atari 2600 that likely provided the first video game experience for many of those reading this. While this is an amazing announcement for so many reasons, the most impressive part might be that the AI not only matched wits with human players in most cases, but actually went above and beyond the best scores of expert meat-based players in 29 of the 49 games it learned, and bested existing computer based players in a whopping 43. Google and DeepMind aren’t looking to just put their initials atop the best score screens of arcades everywhere with this project – the long-term goal is to create the building blocks for optimal problem solving

Google just unveiled plans for a new headquarters in Mountain View that looks like a series of canopies or even almost geodesic-dome like formations. This is the first time the company has designed and built offices from scratch, and it’s partnering with Bjarke Ingels at BIG and Thomas Heatherwick at Heatherwick Studio, which will lead to a better way of working. Instead of very permanent buildings, Ingels and Heatherwick conceived of lightweight block structures that can be moved around as Google gets into new areas as it has in the past with self-driving cars and smart contact lenses. Moreover, the company envisions a campus that more seamlessly blends into the surrounding area. Areas are open to the public as well as Google employees. “It needs to be a neighborhood in Mountain View,” the video above says. That’s a contentious point, as Google has long wanted to build north of 5,000 housing units in the area, which the city council has resisted. The inability to co-locat

Dear Google: what happened? Android sales are falling. Chrome has become a bloated hog. Analysts are calling you the new Microsoft, or, much worse, “the new Yahoo!” And most damning of all: you have squandered our trust. You used to be special, Google. Or at least we used to believe you were special. But you seem more and more like just another megacorporation. Does that sound harsh? Consider the Zoe Keating kerfuffle: YouTube gave Keating a take-it-or-leave contract, some terms of which were unacceptable to her. Some of the terms were also pretty hard to understand […] As YouTube now explains it — following a public debate following Keating’s blog post — Keating has a relatively simple choice […] These responses go against descriptions of the agreement presented to Keating (and transcribed by her) by YouTube previously, and presumably represent an update to the contract’s terms. Read More

Google today launched PerfKit, an open-source cloud-benchmarking tool that, in Google’s words, is an “effort to define a canonical set of benchmarks to measure and compare cloud offerings.” The PerfKit tools currently support Google’s own Compute Engine, Amazon’s AWS and Microsoft’s Azure clouds. Google says it has worked on this project with over 30 researchers, companies and customers, including ARM, Canonical, Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, Rackspace and Red Hat. As Google points out in today’s announcement, evaluating the performance of different cloud services isn’t easy. There are a few companies like CloudHarmony that offer cloud-performance reports (and tools like New Relic obviously let you monitor your existing installs), but none of these take your specific needs into account, and it’s often unclear how those tests were performed. Once installed, PerfKit runs about 20 benchmark tests that look at everything from raw CPU performance to more complex database and network ben

It’s Safer Internet Day  today and while you are probably not celebrating the occasion with an overpriced prix fixe dinner and roses, it’s not a bad time to remember that hacks don’t only happen to big media organizations. To give you a bit of extra motivation to check on your security settings in Google, the company is giving away 2GB of permanent Drive space to anybody who goes through its Security Checkup within the next week. I just went through the process and it’s pretty straightforward (or as a Google spokesperson told me, “my mom could understand this – and that’s often not true with online security!”). While working your way through the wizard, you’ll check your recovery information, recent activity, account permissions and passwords, as well as your two-factor authentication settings. Chances are, everything will look pretty clean, but I ended up revoking access to my accounts from a couple of applications I hadn’t used for more than a year, for example. Once you’re

Google purchased Boston Dynamics last year, which means it now owns the company’s ongoing robotics projects, including BigDog. Today, the Google subsidiary posted videos of a smaller dog-like robot, aptly named Spot, which weighs around 160 lbs, has an electric powerhouse and can operate both indoors and outside. The robot, as you can see from the clip, can walk, trot and climb across all types of terrain, and can even survive attempts to destabilize it by unfeeling humans eager with their kicks. The robot isn’t quite the pack animal that BigDog is, since its larger predecessor weighs 240 lbs and can carry 340 lbs, but it looks like it might be able to travel with more agility, if not more speed, and it’s more able to operate in environs where there isn’t much room to navigate. You could easily see Spot bravely rushing into blown out buildings, for instance, or navigating crowded city streets while recovering from attempts by passers-by to upend it. Spot manages to look surpris

Google is ending the Glass experiment. After today, Google will stop selling the novel device — at least in its current form. Google insists the product is still in development and it’s highly likely that a new version will eventually be released. News broke last week that the Google Glass will be pulled from the market and the project was spinning out of Google X skunkworks to exist as a standalone project.  Former Apple executive and Nest founder Tony Fadell is now overseeing the project. The future of Glass rests in capable hands. Glass launched with much fanfare three years ago in April 2012 and failed to become a consumer hit. But it did spark imaginative ideas, which could have been Google’s plan all along. As a Google spokesperson told us last week, the idea behind the Explorer program was always to see how people would use the technology. Now that Google has received quite a bit of feedback — both good and bad — it decided to close the program in order to focus on fu

Google ending its Glass Explorer program yesterday sparked a round of eulogies for the oft-ridiculed face computer. That’s premature at best. In its current form, Glass is undoubtedly dead, but there’s no reason to believe Google won’t relaunch it with a new version in the coming month — likely around its annual I/O developer conference. Despite plenty of early hype and generally positive coverage, Glass turned into a public relations issue for Google the day it went on sale. Google, which is typically quick to cancel failing projects, decided to stoically sit this one out. Now, Glass is becoming its own business unit inside of Google, Tony Fadell will oversee the program, and sales to businesses, developers and schools will continue. Google is also encouraging developers to continue writing apps for the platform. Those are not signs that Google plans to cancel the platform. With Fadell in charge, I doubt Google will only focus on business use cases. Fadell doesn’t do enterprise

Google has been working on self-driving cars for a few years now — but up until recently, they were mostly modifying the heck out of existing cars, not building a vehicle from the ground up. Back in May, they released a mockup of what they expected their first built-in-house vehicle to look like. Today, they’ve released a photo of the real deal. Here was its original early mockup, from May: As you might notice, the final product ended up looking pretty darn similar to the early shots. While the vehicle still looks a bit like something out of a Richard Scarry book, some tweaks have been made. For example: It has headlights now, which is a good thing. Even if a self-driving car can see other cars without headlights (thanks, RADAR!), that doesn’t mean other (non-self driving) cars can see you. They’ve tweaked the front grill a bit, adding reflector dots and generally making it look a bit less like this emoticon: . The hardware on top of the car (a camera/radar

Here’s something neat. Google has introduced offline video playback for YouTube mobile users. That’s an exciting feature but there’s bad news for most TechCrunch readers: it’s only available on Android devices in India, Indonesia or the Philippines at this point. The company said the update will allow “much of [the] popular YouTube content” in these places to be watched without an internet connection. Videos that support playback will include an offline icon which, once tapped, offers a choice of playback quality. Once cached, each one is available to watch without internet access for up to 48 hours. Google has specifically picked these three markets because of the importance of mobile internet, coupled with the lack of people with data packages — not to mention the sometimes frustratingly poor quality of internet too. “Asia has proven itself to be a mobile-first world in terms of smartphone adoption, but access to high-speed, affordable data remains a big challenge. In respo

Google has just released its ‘best stuff of the year’ on Google Play for 2014, and in terms of most downloaded content, it’s not all that different from Apple’s list. Frozen, The Walking Dead, and Fancy by Iggy Azalea all placed at the top of the list in their respective categories, though the app situation varied a bit from that of Apple’s list, which is an editorial decision while Google focuses on downloads. In the Google Play store, top apps included Duolingo (which made Apple’s list last year), Netflix, Facebook, and MyFitness Pal to name a few. Google also said that Health and Fitness was the fastest growing app category. Here’s the full list from Google. Congrats to the folks who are on it. APPS Most Downloaded Apps by Category in 2014 Education: Duolingo Health & Fitness: MyFitnessPal Music: Pandora Photography:Flipagram Social: Facebook Entertainment: Netflix Sports:NFL Mobile Travel: TripAdvisor The Year’s Fastest Growing App Category Health &

Each year, Google releases a list of the topics we’ve collectively searched for the most over the past 12 months. Each year, I try and see how many I can guess beforehand. This year, I got about half. How many can you get? [Pro tip: remember, people generally search for depressing/scary stuff more than pretty much anything else.] Google released two lists this year — one for US search trends, and one for worldwide search trends. The lists are mostly the same, with just a few differences. US Trending Searches: Robin Williams World Cup Ebola Malaysia Airlines Flappy Bird ALS Ice Bucket Challenge ISIS Ferguson Frozen Ukraine Global Trending Searches: Robin Williams World Cup Ebola Malaysia Airlines ALS Ice Bucket Challenge Flappy Bird Conchita Wurst ISIS Frozen Sochi Olympics The two lists are strikingly similar, save for the global list leaning toward Conchita Wurst and the Sochi Olympics in place of Ferguson and Ukraine. Interesting to note: this is t

The Internet is like a delicate rainforest ecosystem. You remove one player and the rest suffer and die. That happened in Spain this week when the government there began cracking down on Google. The Spanish government is requiring the company to pay Spanish news providers every time their content appears on the site. The search giant will shut down Google News there in response and no content will be available from the country’s major newspapers including El Pais and La Vanguardia. As you can imagine, this is bad news. While newspapers have long claimed they can survive in the Internet Age without outside support, this is dead wrong. Given that the vast majority of news traffic comes from search – everything from “new laser printer” to “is betty white married” returns information from news sources – I can only imagine how much Spanish newspapers depend on Google for their reach and visitor count. According to the Spain Report, the Spanish Newspaper Publishers’ Association is now

In October, we spotted that Amazon had quietly launched a hidden and functional app store within its main Android application which was available for download on Google Play. Now, according to new reports from varying sources, Amazon’s flagship application’s listing is no longer available via search from within Google Play, though its direct link is still live. Additionally, there’s now a newly launched application called Amazon Shopping which looks much like the original application, but no longer includes the Appstore section. The change was first spotted by German site Caschys Blog who also received a statement from Amazon which claims that this is related to a September update that brought Amazon’s Prime Instant Video to Android users. That update involved having users update to or install the newest version of the main Amazon app, then download the Amazon Instant Video Player app afterwards, in order to watch Prime Instant Video on their Android devices. Amazon has sent us t

Google Cardboard was the big surprise of this year’s Google I/O, and Google today announced that more than 500,000 of these extremely minimalist, phone-based virtual reality viewers have shipped since then. The early cardboard app was a lot of fun, but over the last few months, it felt like development had stalled a bit. Today, however, the company is launching an update to the cardboard app and new SDKs. It’s also showcasing some of the apps that developers have created over the last few months. These apps now also have their own dedicated collection page in Google Play and range from a Paul McCartney performance video to a 360-degree view of the Lord Of the Ring’s Shire movie set in New Zealand, with a couple of games and a Volvo-sponsored driving app thrown in for good measure. The open-source Cardboard viewer itself isn’t seeing any changes, but Google is introducing new SDKs for Android and the Unity game engine today that will make it even easier for developers to create ne

It’s no fad. Just nine months after hitting 200 million users, Instagram now says 300 million people use its photo app every month, with 70% of them coming from outside the US. That makes Instagram officially bigger than Twitter, which had 284 million active users as of six weeks ago. Instagram’s been going strong for four years now, and despite fears that the acquisition by Facebook would screw it up, there’s now 70 million photos shared each day, and over 30 billion total. Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom says “Over the past four years, what began as two friends with a dream has grown into a global community.” Between Facebook’s 1.35 billion, Messenger’s 500 million, and WhatsApp’s 600 million users, Facebook has developed a jaw dropping mobile footprint. With growth steady, Instagram is now looking to strengthen its authenticity. Soon it plans to launch verified badges for celebrities, brands, and athletes so people don’t accidentally follow parody, tribute, or look-alike accou