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YouTube will stream the CoD and Overwatch leagues in 2020
Activision Blizzard's next big esports bet, Call of Duty League, gets underway today. While the company worked with Twitch in the past on Overwatch League, that's not where you'll be able to watch its latest foray into top-level competitive gaming. YouTube will be Activision Blizzard's exclusive worldwide streaming partner (except for China) for both leagues this year, along with Hearthstone events and other esports endeavors.
The New York Times taps Google's AI to find stories in old photos
The New York Times has somewhere in the realm of five to seven million physical photos in its enormous archive, many of which date back more than a century. The images document vital moments and contain valuable records of our recent history, but the hard copies are vulnerable to deterioration (they fortunately survived flooding in 2015). To protect the photos, the Times is digitizing the archive with Google Cloud.
Google supports small-scale journalism with free G Suite licenses
Earlier this year, Google announced that it would put $300 million towards fighting fake news and part of that effort included the Google News Initiative, a program aimed at strengthening the quality of journalism, enabling new business models to drive growth and empowering news organizations through innovative technologies. Now, the company says it will support local, small and medium-sized news organizations through its new Google News Initiative Cloud Program.
Google will predict Final Four performance based on in-game data (updated)
Google has been working closely with the NCAA during this year's tournament, but now, during the Final Four, the company will be using predictive analytics to make predictions about second half performance. The wrinkle here is that the team will use data from the first half of the game to come up with their prediction during halftime. They'll then create an ad right in the Alamodome, which will air before the beginning of the second half of the game.
Google details how it protected services like Gmail from Spectre
Google says it already deployed anti-Spectre and Meltdown solutions to protect its products, and users didn't even notice. The downside of the patches companies are rolling out to fix the CPU vulnerabilities is that they have the potential to slow down systems. For the big G, that means slowdown for huge services like Gmail, Google Drive and Search and its Cloud products. Mountain View had to gather hundreds of engineers working across the company to find a way to protect its products. After a few months, they found a solution for Meltdown and the first variant of Spectre (two of the three vulnerabilities), which they then started rolling out way back in September. Google says it didn't get any complaint reporting performance degradation after it deployed the fix.
Google is ready to take over your office chat with Hangouts
Google's work of transitioning Hangouts from being its default chat app to a more business focus is nearly complete. First up is the formally announced Hangouts Meet. Sound familiar? That's because it semi-officially arrived at the first of the month. Now Google is ready to take it wide. At its core, Meet is all about making video conferencing faster and easier. That comes down to not needing any special software or logins for video chat -- just a shared link. No WiFi? No problem because people can dial in with a dedicated phone number too. So long as their organization is a G Suite Enterprise customer, of course. Meet will support video calls with up to 30 people.
Google's Pixel phones arrive with full-res photo and video storage
In addition to unveiling its new Pixel phones at its big keynote today, Google revealed that its new handsets will come with unlimited cloud storage for full-resolution pictures and videos. That's a big deal if you plan to take advantage of the devices' 4K shooting capabilities and shoot stills at full 12.3-megapixel resolution. It's worth noting that the company already offers something similar with Google Photos, but the current arrangement still doesn't necessarily guarantee images will be saved at their fullest resolution.
Google opens up its machine learning tricks to all
There may now be an easier way to implement advanced machine learning models in your projects. Google has opened up its Cloud Machine Learning to all businesses in a public beta, after a few months of testing it in private alpha. The tool makes it easier to train models at a much faster rate, and is integrated with the Google Cloud Platform. This has applications for businesses in areas such as customer support (learning how to automate responses to a variety of queries and complaints) or any kind of repetition-heavy task.
Google makes Docs, Drive and Calendar more productive
If you spend your work days toiling in Google's productivity apps, the first thing you might notice today is that Google for Work is now called "G Suite". Once you get past the new label, you might also notice a slew of smart updates across the board that ought to save you time and keep your workflow moving.
Google Apps for Work has a new name: G Suite
As predicted, Google Apps for Work has a new name. Calendar, Drive, Docs, Gmail, Maps for Work, Search for Work, Sheets and Slides all fall under "G Suite" now. A few of those items might jump out at you as being Google Apps for Work. It all falls under Google Cloud (the backend powering everything), as TechCrunch writes, and will encompass Chromebooks too. Nope, definitely not unnecessarily complicated at all. The whole reason for the change? Proving that the search juggernaut is all about its enterprise customers. "We are the full power of Google in the Cloud," the company's Diane Greene said. "We are Google Cloud." That's one way of showing off your confidence, I guess. The company promises G Suite will continue to grow, with built-in collaboration being the name of the game.
Google for Work will supposedly be renamed to Google Cloud
If you're used to seeing Google for Work branding on your employer's web apps like Docs and Inbox, changes are coming. For now, it sounds superficial, according to a report from The Information. The publication's sources say that the search juggernaut is changing the name to Google Cloud, and that the change will also cover Chromebooks and Android devices in addition to web services. "The name change is Google's way of saying, 'We have the best cloud platform, period,'" according to an anonymous source. The publication goes on to say that this should all be made official at a Google Cloud event later this month on the 29th.
Google gives the world a peek at its secret servers
Google has given everyone a rare look inside its server rooms and detailed how keeps up with the massive growth of its search business. In a blog post, Google Fellow Amin Vadat said that the company's current network, Jupiter, can deliver a petabit per second of total throughput. That means each of its 100,000 total servers can randomly speak to each other at a speed of 10Gb/s, a hundred times faster than the first-generation network it created in 2005. To get there, Google did something surprising -- it built its own hardware from off-the-shelf parts.
Google teams with researchers to store and crunch cancer data
Healthcare is the new black, and Google has waded into the fray with projects like Helpouts and smart contacts. Now, its Research at Google arm will team with a think tank called the Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) to create the Cancer Genomics Cloud. The $6.5 million project will migrate massive amounts of data from the Cancer Genome Atlas to the Google Cloud platform, giving cancer researchers around the world a common database to work with. Google will also provide the compute power needed to analyze the massive datasets. Though genome studies have provided a huge boost to cancer research, they've excluded many smaller institutions that don't have large processing clusters. ISB said the new cloud will "democratize" the field by opening it up to more researchers and making collaboration just a Hangout away. [Image credit: Getty Images]
Google launches cloud-based tools for iPhone developers and they're beautiful
It's never been easier to build an app than it is in the modern era, but thanks to Google, it's just gotten a lot easier. Today Google is launching its cloud-based development toolset for iOS, giving developers access to cheap, easy and free options for connecting to Google's cloud services. Android developers gained access to the tools this past April, but this is their iOS debut. Google's Mobile Backend Starter for iOS provides a quick and easy backend for your app and gives you access to cloud data storage that can be shared between users, device-to-device push notifications, device notifications of data changes and the ability to authenticate users via their Google Accounts. Google has provided a clear and simple walkthrough of how to get started with the new service here. Thanks to Google's options for taking care of the mobile backend of your app, you'll be able to focus on what really matters: writing your app. Head over to Google Cloud Platform to take a look at exactly what Google's offerings are. It's a remarkable program right now, but given Google's history of taking something remarkable and improving it with time, we can't wait to see what tools they add to the service in the future.
Insync: Wave 'Bye, Bye, Bye' to Dropbox
There's another cloud based storage service planning to knock DropBox from its perch, only this one's also got the benefit of an amusing name. Insync offers all the same online-file management and sharing facilities that you'll be familiar with, but the company's tooled up for a price war. It's using Google storage as a backbone, charging only $0.25 per GB/year rather than DropBox's $2.00 -- with the hope that people follow their wallets and the promise of deep integration into Mountain View's online services including being able to edit your documents online. (Although we're not sure what would happen if Google's long rumored GDrive suddenly appears.) After the break we've got a video by Marques Brownlee that tours the service which we assure you, is free of Joey Fatone.
Wyoming wholly commits to Google apps, adds more flair to state's firsts
Milestone-maker may not be the first words that come to mind when you think 'Wyoming,' but consider this: the state lays claim to the first ever national park (Yellowstone), the first national monument (Devil's Tower), and to being first for women's suffrage. Not content to rest on its laurels, Wyoming Governor Matt Mead put on his early adopter hat and marched all ten thousand civil servant soldiers into the Google cloud. It's a major first for both parties, and might even help Google ease the federal government's earlier MS-favoring snub. By switching solely to Google Apps for Government, Mead says the move will save his great territory significant coin, not to mention getting everybody under the Gmail umbrella like Los Angeles did back in 2009. Unintended consequence of the move? The inefficiency of, oh, about nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine workers whiling away their days on Gchat. Check below for official video of the address.
