Tag Archives: Google

Google lays off staff from Flutter, Dart, and Python teams weeks before its developer conference | TechCrunch

Ahead of Google’s annual I/O developer conference in May, the tech giant has laid off staff across key teams like Flutter, Dart, Python and others, according to reports from affected employees shared on social media. Google confirmed the layoffs to TechCrunch, but not the specific teams, roles or how many people were let go.

“As we’ve said, we’re responsibly investing in our company’s biggest priorities and the significant opportunities ahead,” said Google spokesperson Alex García-Kummert. “To best position us for these opportunities, throughout the second half of 2023 and into 2024, a number of our teams made changes to become more efficient and work better, remove layers, and align their resources to their biggest product priorities. Through this, we’re simplifying our structures to give employees more opportunity to work on our most innovative and important advances and our biggest company priorities, while reducing bureaucracy and layers,” he added.

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Tech earnings: Google, Microsoft and Snap shares climb | CNN Business

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, bounced back from an absolutely dreadful day for tech shares, as its stock surged Thursday after the closing bell. All it had to do was to hand out billions of dollars to investors.

The tech giant announced its first quarterly cash dividend, saying it will pay $0.20 per share on June 17 to shareholders of record as of June 10, as well as a $70 billion share buyback. Buybacks and dividends help to boost stock prices by rewarding investors with cash just for holding the stock — but they’re widely criticized for artificially inflating the stock price without spending on employees or improvements to the underlying business.

Google’s stock jumped as much as 13% in after-hours trading following the report.

The announcement came as part of Google’s earnings report for the first three months of the year, in which it also reported that it exceeded Wall Street analysts’ expectations for both sales and profits.

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Sick of Google? 5 Search Engine Alternatives to Try in 2024 | Cool Business Ideas 

Sick of Google? 5 Search Engine Alternatives to Try in 2024 While Google remains dominant in the search engine market, several alternative search engines offer unique features, privacy-focused options, and specialized search capabilities when researching questions like “Can bunion cause leg pain?” If you want to diversify your online search experience, here are some notable alternatives to Google.

1. DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo has gained popularity for its strong emphasis on user privacy. Unlike Google, DuckDuckGo does not track user data or personalize search results based on browsing history. This commitment to privacy makes it an excellent choice for users concerned about online tracking and data collection. DuckDuckGo also offers a clean interface and instant answers sourced from a variety of crowdsourced platforms.

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Bitcoin spot ETF volume rose, Coinbase went to court, Solana Mobile announces new device and Google cuts crypto apps in India | TechCrunch

Welcome to TechCrunch Crypto, formerly known as Chain Reaction. Alongside our regularly scheduled news bits, I’ll be testing out some recurring segments and features — so if you do (or don’t) like what you see, let me know at jacquelyn@techcrunch.com.

A lot of news transpired in the wild world of web3: Solana Mobile’s new device brought in over 30,000 preorders, the highly anticipated Electric Capital developer report showed good — and bad — news for developers, Coinbase went to court and India faced more crypto woes. More details below.

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Google’s best Gemini demo was faked | TechCrunch

Google’s new Gemini AI model is getting a mixed reception after its big debut yesterday, but users may have less confidence in the company’s tech or integrity after finding out that the most impressive demo of Gemini was pretty much faked.

A video called “Hands-on with Gemini: Interacting with multimodal AI” hit a million views over the last day, and it’s not hard to see why. The impressive demo “highlights some of our favorite interactions with Gemini,” showing how the multimodal model (i.e., it understands and mixes language and visual understanding) can be flexible and responsive to a variety of inputs.

To begin with, it narrates an evolving sketch of a duck from a squiggle to a completed drawing, which it says is an unrealistic color, then evinces surprise (“What the quack!”) when seeing a toy blue duck. It then responds to various voice queries about that toy, then the demo moves on to other show-off moves, like tracking a ball in a cup-switching game, recognizing shadow puppet gestures, reordering sketches of planets, and so on.

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Google Sues Facebook Scammers Spreading Malware Disguised as its Bard AI Chatbot | Mashable

AI is the big thing right now. So, of course, scammers have glommed on to the hype in order to take advantage of people interested in new technology.

Now, Google is stepping in and suing a group of scammers impersonating the tech giant to steal victims’ sensitive data.

In a new post on the company’s official blog, Google General Counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado announced that it had filed a lawsuit in California on Monday against a scammer group that had duped users into downloading malware on Facebook.

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3 ways Google Chrome is speeding up your searches | Mashable

Google wants to help you speed up your searches.

The tech giant published a blog this week debuting new features for your Chrome address bar that should improve your search abilities. Everyone could likely use some more efficiency online. And while you can read the whole piece from Google, here are few of the new features the company dropped.

1. There is improved autocomplete

Google searches in Chrome should now anticipate the URL you actually want when you begin searching. As an example, Google noted that simple typing “flights” into the search bar will give you the option of autocompleting to Google Flights, even though the ultimate destination URL actually begins with “google.com/travel.” That should be a helpful upgrade when you know where you want to end up, even if you don’t know the actual URL.

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Google Antitrust Trial: What Small Business Owners Need to Know | Small Business Trends

In what’s being termed as the most significant US antitrust trial in decades, Google’s dominance over internet search is under scrutiny.

This development could bring forth changes that impact every facet of the digital landscape, especially for small business owners who rely on search engines to drive traffic and sales.

Google Antitrust Trial Begins

Search Engine Landscape Might Change

Google’s search engine, which processes billions of queries daily, is at the heart of this lawsuit. Should Google lose the trial, it could reshape how search engine operations function. This could influence where and how businesses advertise and may affect search visibility for many.

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Google Salary Data Leak Shows Employee Compensation in 2022 | Entrepreneur

Tech jobs have long been in the top ranks among the highest-paying industries, but some companies really shell out the dough for their engineers.

In 2022, the median total compensation for Google employees was $279,802, according to leaked internal data from the company reviewed by Business Insider. Among the highest-paying positions at Google, software engineers led the pack with a maximum base salary of $718,000 last year.

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Google adjusts privacy policy allowing use of public data for AI training | Mashable

Google can now use public data to help train and create AI products, according to new privacy policy changes.

As of July 1, the tech giant’s newly adjusted policy reads: “Google uses information to improve our services and to develop new products, features and technologies that benefit our users and the public. For example, we use publicly available information to help train Google’s AI models and build products and features like Google Translate, Bard, and Cloud AI capabilities.”

Previously, the policy only stated that publicly available information could be used to help train Google “language models” and gave a single mention of Google Translate.

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