Jaikumar Vijayan

Users of Google Street View soon will see substantial improvements in the quality of the panoramic images that are viewable via the application. Google has rolled out a new Street View renderer for the JavaScript API in Google Maps that the company says addresses several shortcomings in the old renderer such as jerky transitions and […]

A Russian court rejected Google’s appeal of a lower court finding in an antitrust case involving the company’s Android bundling practices. The decision by Moscow’s Ninth Arbitration Court of Appeal leaves intact a judgment by the country’s Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) earlier this month ordering Google to pay a fine of $6.7 million and to […]

Individuals and groups planning on using Google Hangouts On Air to live-stream content to audiences around the world had better hurry. Those wishing to schedule new Hangouts, take note: Google announced Aug. 15 that it is moving the video-streaming service to YouTube Live from Google+ effective Sept. 12. New live-stream events cannot be scheduled on […]

Google has begun work on a brand-new open-source operating system called Fuchsia. From the few details that are publicly available on it on the GitHub code repository, Fuchsia will be completely different from Google’s Android and Chrome operating systems. Fuchsia appears to be targeted at smartphones, high-end PCs featuring fast processors and large amounts of […]

The same week that authorities in Russia slapped Google with a $6.8 million fine for its Android bundling practices in the country, regulators in South Korea have opened an investigation against the company for what appears to be the same reason. The Korea Fair Trade Commission (KFTC) is looking at whether Google’s business practices are […]

Russia’s Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) has fined Google the equivalent of $6.8 million for violating the country’s fair competition laws. The fine comes about one year after the FAS opened its investigation against Google and represents mixed news for the company. One the one hand, the penalty suggests that regulators in the many countries where […]

Google has rolled back prices on its so-called preemptible virtual machines by up to 33 percent in an apparent bid to spur broader enterprise interest in its cloud machines by up computing services. The new pricing is already in force and in some instances makes it up to 80 percent cheaper for enterprises to sign […]

Google’s cloud platform technologies will form the basis of a soon-to-be-launched Clinical Genomics Service from Stanford Medicine. The service will give clinicians and medical researchers at Stanford a way to analyze massive genomic data sets to diagnose certain diseases more quickly and efficiently than possible currently. The two organizations this week announced a partnership under […]

Chris Urmson, chief technology officer of Google parent Alphabet’s autonomous car initiative, and one of its longest-serving engineers, has left the project apparently to explore other opportunities. In a post on Medium, Urmson offered no explanation for his seemingly abrupt decision to resign from his position seven and a half years after leaving Carnegie Mellon […]

Several businesses that make their money bundling third-party software with other applications are using deceptive practices to distribute unwanted apps on user systems, researchers from Google and New York University warned in a report released this week. The report is based on a yearlong study of the internet’s so-called pay-per-install (PPI) ecosystem, in which a […]