Jaikumar Vijayan

Google has begun pilot-testing a new mobile-payment application that will let smartphone users pay for purchases by verbally providing their initials to the cashier at the point-of-sale system. The company is inviting Android and iOS users in San Francisco’s South Bay area to try out the new app, dubbed Hands Free, at a small number […]

Google has updated the data loss prevention capabilities in Gmail for customers of the premium business version of Google Apps for Work. The new functions, announced Feb. 29, include those that enable scanning of images in email attachments, enhanced detection of personally identifiable content in email messages and better control over data loss prevention (DLP) […]

Google has updated its Cloud Trace cloud application debugging tool with new features that it says will help enterprises troubleshoot and mitigate performance issues in a more efficient manner. The updates include an automatic performance analysis function, a latency detection capability and an optimized user interface that provides developers with a single unified view of […]

Google has made its Project Shield denial-of-service attack mitigation technology available for free to news organizations around the world. Publishers that meet the company’s definition of a news Website can submit an application to sign up for the service. Human rights organizations and Websites that monitor elections-related content also are eligible to sign up for […]

First it was the UK government, and now it is France that is unhappy with Google’s alleged tax avoidance. France’s finance ministry reportedly wants Google to pay the government the equivalent of nearly $1.8 billion in back taxes on revenues earned in that country over the past several years, according to Reuters, quoting an unnamed […]

Starting this week, people searching for news stories on Google’s mobile search engine will see some stories loading a lot faster than others as publishers start pushing out pages based on the company’s Accelerated Mobile Pages framework. Web pages created using Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, will appear under the “Top Stories” section of the […]

Music streaming service Spotify’s more than 20 million paying customers around the world will soon have their music delivered from Google’s cloud infrastructure. In a major win for Google, Spotify has decided to move off its home-built technology infrastructure to Google’s Cloud Computing Platform. The migration will take place over the next several months and […]

Google is leading a multi-partner effort to accelerate the availability of Rich Communications Services (RCS) on the Android platform. The company will work with several global telecom operators, including Vodafone, Sprint, MTN, Orange, Bharti Airtel and Deutsche Telekom, to develop consistent feature sets, configurations and implementation standards for RCS on Android. “Operators have agreed to […]

Users of Gmail for Android now have a way to extend the app’s anti-spam protection, inbox organization and additional features to other email accounts including Yahoo, Hotmail or Microsoft Outlook. The company has introduced what it calls a “Gmailify” option that lets Android users integrate their non-Google email accounts with the Gmail app so they […]

Software capable of automatically recognizing content in your vacation photos and tagging them so they become easier to search or capable of detecting inappropriate content in images hosted on your crowd-sourced site is not entirely new. But Google wants such capabilities to become more broadly available through its Cloud Vision API, technology it previewed in […]

Google rolled out a service option that is aimed at enabling enterprises to purchase cloud instances tailored to their specific requirements. Now generally available, Google’s Custom Machine Types option had been out in beta form since November. Custom Machine Types is designed to give customers a way to purchase cloud virtual machine configurations in memory […]

Google’s Project Loon initiative to deliver Internet connectivity to poorly connected areas via a global network of high-altitude balloons could be headed for carrier testing later this year. In a talk at the TED conference in Vancouver, British Columbia, this week, the head of Google parent Alphabet’s X group reported that the company is in […]