Jaikumar Vijayan

Google’s efforts to push broad adoption of Rich Communication Services for cross-operator messaging on mobile devices appear to be gaining traction. The company announced on Nov. 4 that it has launched RCS messaging for Sprint customers that are using Android phones. The new support will allow Android users to conduct group chats, send high-resolution photos, […]

Google this week once again formally rejected charges in the European Union that the manner in which it displays results on Google Shopping harms rival comparison-shopping sites. In a blog post, Kent Walker, Google’s senior vice president and general counsel, defended the company’s approach to online shopping searches and said that the changes demanded by […]

Tens of thousands of websites using digital certificates issued by two certificate authorities to verify their online identities have been affected by a Google decision this week to discontinue trusting those certificates because of concerns over their validity. In a blog post Oct. 31, Google said that its Chrome browser would stop trusting any certificate […]

Microsoft rebuked Google for releasing details of a security flaw in the Windows kernel for which a patch is not yet available. Microsoft officials said that Google’s disclosure potentially endangers customers and that they believe in coordinated vulnerability disclosures. In an Oct. 31 blog post, Neel Mehta and Billy Leonard, security researchers with Google’s Threat […]

Google has introduced a couple of new features to help administrators better manage company-owned Android smartphones and tablets in the enterprise. One of them is a bulk enrollment feature that lets organizations enroll Android devices en masse and deploy them to remote offices and other locations with all required settings enforced. Administrators can assign a […]

Google parent Alphabet’s better-than-expected third-quarter results show that while the company continues to rely heavily on advertising dollars, some of its other businesses—most notably its cloud unit—have begun contributing meaningfully to the top line. Revenue from Google’s cloud business and the sale of digital content via its Play store accounted for $2.4 billion, or more […]

Google this week broadened its range of hardware offerings with Jamboard, a new digital whiteboard product. The whiteboard—which features a 55-inch 4K touch-responsive display, integrated speakers, HD camera and WiFi—will be available for under $6,000 when it starts shipping sometime in 2017. Jamboard will allow users to collaborate on projects using data from Google’s full […]

Google’s parent company Alphabet has scaled back plans, temporarily at least, for its much-touted Fiber high-speed Internet service and will lay off about 9 percent of the employees engaged in the project. In addition, Craig Barratt, the Alphabet executive who headed Fiber operations, has resigned from his role amid a reassessment of the company’s strategy […]

Google has acquired Eyefluence, a company that describes itself as providing eye-interaction technology for augmented and virtual reality applications, for an undisclosed sum. Eyefluence announced the purchase in a brief statement on its website this week. The company noted that it had combined forces with Google, but gave no indication of when the transaction had […]

Google has dropped its long-standing policy of keeping data about people’s internet browsing habits separate from personally identifiable information about them obtained from Gmail and other Google log-in accounts. The change was implemented this summer and is enabled by default for new Google accounts, the nonprofit investigative journalism organization ProPublica said in a report released […]

Google has updated its G Suite set of cloud applications with five new features that company officials say will allow people to collaborate and work with each other more efficiently on team projects. The updates follow Google’s recent launch of a feature called Explore in Docs, Slides and Sheets that among other things allows users […]

Google this week introduced a new data archiving option for enterprises as part of a broader refresh of its Cloud Storage Services. The announcements, at Google’s NEXT user event in London this week, included new data life cycle management tools, price cuts and the addition of several new partners to the Google storage ecosystem. Coldline, […]