Steve Thomas - IT Consultant

Another development today in Google’s long-term strategy to streamline some of its less-core business operations. Google Nest Renew — a load shifting service for Google Nest owners get them to consume energy at off-peak times when energy is less expensive, or there are “cleaner” grid options available when your grid is cleaner or energy is […]

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Google’s defeat in its antitrust battle with Epic Games was a sweeping victory for the Fortnite maker and a significant upset to the business model underpinning the mobile app ecosystem, where platforms host app stores and then take a cut of developer revenues. But what does the ruling actually mean, at least in the near […]

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Google Bard, the company’s generative AI chatbot and ChatGPT rival, is getting am update today that the company claims will significantly enhance its capabilities. The company says Bard will now be powered by Gemini, Google’s newest and most advanced AI model, giving the chatbot more advanced reasoning, planning, understanding, and other capabilities. Gemini comes in […]

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Google today announced the launch of its new Gemini large language model (LLM) and with that, the company also launched its new Cloud TPU v5p, an updated version of its Cloud TPU v5e, which launched into general availability earlier this year. A v5p pod consists of a total of 8,960 chips and is backed by […]

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Both Apple and Google today announced their best apps and games of the year, with the hiking and biking companion AllTrails winning as Apple’s iPhone App of the Year in 2023, while the educational app Imprint: Learn Visually won as Google Play’s best app. Meanwhile, Apple and Google agreed on their Game of the Year, […]

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Google today introduced new tools for website owners, including those running social media sites and discussion forums, who want to better elevate their content in Google’s search results. The feature follows Google’s reprioritization of user-generated web content over SEO-optimized junk, which has increasingly become a problem on today’s modern web. In May, Google first rolled […]

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Google Photos is rolling out a set of new features today that will leverage AI technologies to better organize and categorize photos for you. With the addition of something called Photo Stacks, Google will use AI to identify the “best” photo from a group of photos taken together and select it as the top pick […]

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There have been a growing number of complaints that Google Search is not as useful as it used to be. In fact, Google execs even admitted that young people are turning to services like TikTok and Instagram for their search needs, or are appending terms like “Reddit” to the end of queries to get more […]

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Though Match settled its antitrust case with Google over Play Store fees for north of $300 million, Fortnite maker Epic Games proceeded to take its case to trial this week. The game maker argues that Google’s commissions on in-app purchases are anti-competitive and that Google has exerted its power in the marketplace to unfairly compete […]

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Last week, Google and Match reached a settlement in the app store antitrust case where Match had sought the right to offer its users an alternative to Google Billing in an effort to avoid Google’s Play Store commissions on in-app purchases. As a part of the agreement, Match said it would implement Google’s new User […]

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Google today is announcing strengthened protections for Android developers publishing apps to its Google Play store. The changes are a part of Google’s broader efforts at keeping low-quality and unsafe apps out of its app store and off consumers’ devices, which also recently included the launch of a new real-time app scanning feature to combat […]

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Google’s AI-powered search experience is rolling out worldwide, after initial launches in select markets including the U.S., India, and Japan. Starting today, the AI-based conversational experience known as SGE, or Search Generative Experience, will be available in over 120 new countries and territories, globally. It will also support four new languages: Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, and […]

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