Jaikumar Vijayan

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 […]

Google wants to work with university researchers on short-term projects involving the use of its software and technologies in emerging Internet of things applications. The company this week announced an Internet of Things (IoT) Technology Research Award Pilot program under which it is seeking applications from academic researchers looking to explore “interesting use cases and […]

In what could be a sign that Google is finally feeling the pressure from European data regulators, the company has reportedly agreed to block access more broadly than it does now to search results that fall afoul of the European Union’s “right to be forgotten” mandate. The mandate, which went into effect in 2014, basically […]

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has granted a recent Google request that the artificial intelligence system behind its self-driving vehicles be considered the “driver” of the vehicle under federal automobile safety laws. “NHTSA will interpret ‘driver’ in the context of Google’s described motor vehicle design as referring to the [Self-Driving System], and not to […]

Starting June 30, Google will stop accepting display advertisements that are built in Adobe Flash in favor of ads using the HTML5 standard. Advertisers will no longer be able to upload ads based on Flash into Google’s AdWords and DoubleClick Digital Marketing ad platforms after that date. Only ads based on HTML5 will be accepted, […]