Category Archives: Google

Customers look at the Apple's new iPhone 11 series smartphones in an Apple retail store on East Nanjing Road in Shanghai.

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With the U.S.-China trade war last year and the outbreak of the new coronavirus, American technology firms Apple, Microsoft and Google have reportedly looked to move more production of their hardware products out of the world's second-largest economy.

But reducing reliance on China won't be easy.

"China manufacturing is far more embedded into American supply chains than ever before,"Sean Maharaj, managing director at AArete, a global management consultancy.

Google and Microsoft are accelerating their efforts to shift production of hardware to other parts of Asia, the Nikkei Asian Review reported last week.

The problem for all these countries is that moving supply chains quickly will be a tough task and China will still have to play a major role. That might mean mitigating risk is a lot harder.

The Nikkei, citing people with direct knowledge of the matter, said Google is set to begin production of an upcoming low-cost smartphone, rumored to be called the Pixel 4a, in Vietnam as soon as April. The upcoming flagship smartphone will also be manufactured there in the second half of the year, according to the report.

Google has also asked a manufacturing partner in Thailand to prepare production lines for its so-called smart home products, such as voice assistant-enabled speakers, Nikkei said.Meanwhile, Microsoft is hoping to start production in Vietnam in the second quarter for its Surface line of notebooks and desktop PCs, it added.

Both of these companies' hardware has been mainly produced in China until now. Microsoft declined to comment while Google did not respond to two requests for information when contacted by CNBC.

Last year, Apple was reportedly looking to start a trial for the production of its AirPods in Vietnam and asked suppliers to look into moving 15% to 30% of production from China to other parts of South East Asia.

Apple did not respond to a request for comment when contacted by CNBC.

To understand why, it's important to break down the manufacturing process.P.S. Subramaniam, partner in the strategic operations practice of Kearney, explains there are electronic components like displays and memory, modules such as cameras, and the assembly of the finished goods.

Around 40% of finished goods come from China globally today and there is capacity in other areas of the world,Subramaniam said. So it's "easier (to) diversify away from China in the short term (3-6 months) for most companies which have well developed product and assembly process documentation," he added.

Meanwhile, around 60% of modules are made in China. That's harder to move away "but still feasible",Subramaniam said.

Shifting manufacturing locations helps diversify risk but isn't a cure-all, and in fact could become a game of whack-a-mole.

Bryan Ma

VP of devices research at IDC

The components part is a bigger issue.

"This is a singular choke point as components are a necessary ingredient in modules and finished goods assemblies. This is very hard to move as it requires entire ecosystems,Subramaniam told CNBC.

Moving component manufacturing outside of China will also be difficult given how entrenched it is and how long it would take to build capacity in another country.

"Some assembly could be moved elsewhere, but these production lines take time to set up, and moreover no other country has the supply of labor as China,"John Harmon, senior analyst at Coresight Research, told CNBC.

On top of that, suppliers for components that companies rely on will have their manufacturing in China. That could make any move for an American technology firm to diversify a much longer process.

"Other suppliers Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese or Korean which have set up facilities around these manufacturing plants in China will have to also diversify, which would make this switch a little bit less quick," Neil Shah, a partner at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.

AArete's Maharaj said that diversifying supply chains away from China can happen, though it will be slow.

"This is like turning an aircraft around slowly," he told CNBC."I think many companies have been seriously exploring supply chain risk mitigation strategies."

"When corporations want to move quickly and make investments, they can. And, they work closely with local governments and businesses to make it happen," Maharaj said. "Given the above momentum i.e. South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam etc. this could all play out more quickly than we had initially expected."

Ultimately though, moving some production out of China may not be something that reduces risk for companies significantly.

"Shifting manufacturing locations helps diversify risk but isn't a cure-all, and in fact could become a game of whack-a-mole," Bryan Ma, vice president of devices research at IDC, told CNBC. "The coronavirus has already spread to other countries, while trade war tariffs similarly could've targeted other countries over time."

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Apple, Microsoft, Google look to move production away from China. That's not going to be easy - CNBC

Google Cloud today announced a new solution for its telecom customers: Anthos for Telecom. You can think of this as a specialized edition of Googles container-based Anthos multi-cloud platform for both modernizing existing applications and building new ones on top of Kubernetes. The announcement, which was originally slated for MWC, doesnt come as a major surprise, given Google Clouds focus on offering very targeted services to its enterprise customers in a number of different verticals.

Given the rise of edge computing and, in the telco business, 5G, Anthos for Telecom makes for an interesting play in what could potentially be a very lucrative market for Google. This is also the market where the open-source OpenStack project has remained the strongest.

Whats maybe even more important here is that Google is also launching a new service called the Global Mobile Edge Cloud (GMEC). With this, telco companies will be able to run their applications not just in Googles 20+ data center regions, but also in Googles more than 130 edge locations around the world.

Were basically giving you compute power on our edge, where previously it was only for Google use, through the Anthos platform, explained Eyal Manor, the VP of Engineering for Anthos. The edge is very powerful and I think we will now see substantially more innovation happening for applications that are latency-sensitive. Weve been investing in edge compute and edge networking for a long time in Google over the years for the internal services. And we think its a fairly unique capability now to open it up for third-party customers.

For now, Google is only making this available to its teleco partners, with AT&T being the launch customers, but over time, Manor said, itll likely open its edge cloud to other verticals, as well. Google also expects to be able to announce other partners in the near future.

As for Anthos for Telecom, Manor notes that this is very much what its customers are asking for, especially now that so many of their new applications are containerized.

[Anthos] brings the best of cloud-as-a-service to our customers, wherever they are, in multiple environments and provide the lock-in free environment with the latest cloud tools, explained Manor. The goal is really to empower developers and operators to move faster in a consistent way, so regardless of where you are, you dont have to train your technical staff. It works on-premise, it works on GCP and on other clouds. And thats what we hear from customers customers really like choice.

In the telecom industry, those customers also want to get higher up the stack and get consistency between their data centers and the edge and all of that, of course, is meant to bring down the cost of running these networks and services.

We dont want to manage the [technology] we previously invested in for many years because the upgrades were terribly expensive and slow for that. I hear that consistently. And please Google, make this seem like a service in the cloud for us, Manor said.

For developers, Anthos also promises to provide the same development experience, no matter where the application is deployed and Google now has an established network of partners that provides both solutions to developers as well as operators around Anthos. To this effect, Google is also launching new partnerships with the Amdocs customer experience platform and Netcracker today.

Were excited to unveil a new strategy today to help telecommunications companies innovate and accelerate their digital transformation through Google Cloud, said Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, in todays announcement. By collaborating closely with leading telecoms, partners and customers, we can transform the industry together and create better overall experiences for our users globally.

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Google Cloud goes after the telco business with Anthos for Telecom and its Global Mobile Edge Cloud - TechCrunch

Google and parent company Alphabet Inc's (NASDAQ: GOOGL) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) exposure to the travel industry will likely impact total revenue as U.S. travel activity appears to have slowed down amid coronavirus concerns, according to Bank of America.

Justin Post maintains a Buy rating on Alphabet's stock with a $1,600 price target.

Google is the largest recipient of travel industry digital ad spend and the travel industry likely accounted for 11% of Google's total $134.5 billion gross advertising revenue, Post wrote in a note. This also implies the travel industry accounts for 9% of Google's total revenue.

Many government agencies and companies have either limited or banned travel activity and this will impact the travel sector in 2020, Post said. Prior to the coronavirus outbreak, Google's travel ad spend was likely growing at around 10% but travel revenue should fall to negative 6.7% in the first quarter and negative 10.2% in the second quarter.

The financial impact is modeled at $647 million in the first quarter and $820 million in the second quarter, or $1.5 billion for the first half of 2020. The research firm is modeling trends to improve after April and will remain under pressure through June. By July, spending activity should revert to normal.

As such, full-year 2020 revenue estimates were lowered from $190.059 billion to $188.561 billion.

Shares of Alphabet were trading lower by nearly 3% at $1,346.40.

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Google's Exposure To Travel Will Impact Revenue, BofA Says - Benzinga

Google has begun informing prospective job candidates that it will be moving all interviews globally to Google Hangouts or BlueJeans due to coronavirus, according to an email sent to one applicant from the Google staffing team.

In light of the coronavirus (COVID-19) and to protect our candidates and interviewers health and wellbeing, we will be conducting all Google interviews globally virtually via Google Hangout (or BlueJeans for applicable countries) for the foreseeable future, Google says in the email, which The Verge has reviewed. Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Google isnt the first to cancel on-site interviews in light of the ongoing coronavirus outbreak. On Monday, Facebook said it would be canceling most in-person job interviews, and Amazon put on-site job interviews on hold indefinitely last week.

Google has taken a number of additional actions to prevent the spread of coronavirus as well. Yesterday, the company canceled the in-person portion of Google I/O, its biggest event of the year. It is also giving away access to Hangouts Meet, canceled Google Cloud Next, and has limited employee travel.

There have been more than 94,000 cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and over 3,200 deaths. Numerous companies are taking measures, from canceling conferences and severely limiting employee travel to expanding work-from-home policies, in response.

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Google bans on-site job interviews for the foreseeable future due to coronavirus - The Verge

Amazon Web Services plans to double its sales staffing numbers this year in the face of mounting competition and slowing growth.

The hiring spree, reportedly announced in a sales meeting in Chicago in January, will bring in security, AI, and data analytics specialists to help AWS's sales staff answer technical questions from customers and sell more services.

The exact size of AWS's sales team is a closely guarded secret, even to its own staff. The cloud biz's chief suit, Andy Jassy, has said the number was in the "thousands" in a 2016 interview, and it has likely grown considerably since then.

AWS dominates cloud computing, munching 32.3 per cent of the market, according to Canalys. That's well ahead of Microsoft's 16.9 per cent and Google's 5.8 per cent.

But the Jeff-Bezos-run titan's enormous growth has begun to slow recently as other providers catch up. Of the big four cloud providers, Google grew the most last year, swelling 87.8 per cent, Microsoft came in second, with 64 per cent growth. Alibaba was close behind with 63.8 per cent. But AWS's growth, at 36 per cent, was half that of its nearest rival.

AWS still posted the biggest revenue increase in absolute terms with $9.2bn compared with Microsoft's $7.1bn but many saw the pair's recent financial results as an early sign that rival services were beginning to catch up with Bezos' behemoth.

Google Cloud's chief exec, Thomas Kurian, recently committed to tripling the size of his sales team as part of a wider restructure. The former Oracle exec has pushed for more services to woo enterprise customers, and is looking to expand Google's reseller network.

Last week, the company inked a deal with LA-based service provider SADA to resell $500m in Google Cloud services over the next three years. Google plans to invest $10bn into data centres and offices across the US this year.

Arch-rival Microsoft has shifted its focus to aggressively target Amazon's cloud clients. The strategy is working, according to some analysts. Last year, Redmond surprised everyone by beating AWS to win the US Department of Defense's $10bn decade-long JEDI IT supply deal, which seeks to switch the the US's military data over to the cloud. AWS appealed the decision and was granted a pause on the contract until the courts came to a decision on whether or not it was awarded fairly.

The new hires make up the first sales shakeup at AWS in several years. Up to now, the cloud giant has focused on selling basic building block services, such as its cloud servers and storage. But the company is now shifting focus to finished products, like Pinpoint, which helps manage marketing campaigns, and Fraud Detector, a service the company is currently testing that detects online fraud. Other AWS services include Outposts and Local Zones.

Amazon recently reported revenues of $280.5bn up 20 per cent on the previous year. About a tenth of this came from AWS, which generated $35.03bn.

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AWS to double sales droids as Google, Microsoft's growing clouds threaten to gobble larger slices of Bezos' pie - The Register

Google and Microsoft have announced that they will offer free access to their teleconferencing tools to help businesses and schools continue operating in spite of the global coronavirus outbreak.

Google will provide free access to the advanced Hangouts meeting service to all G-Suite and G-Suite for Educations customers across the globe, and Microsoft will offer a six-month free trial of Microsoft Teams.

Both these services will allow important organisations to operate remotely and let employees work from home, avoiding interpersonal meetings as well as classroom gatherings.

Google's Advanced Hangout Meet, which can host up to 250 participants and stream live to up to 100,000 users in a domain will be available for free till July 1. This service is otherwise priced between $13 to $25 per user per month.

The company announced, As more employees, educators, and students work remotely in response to the spread of COVID-19, we want to do our part to help them stay connected and productive and as more businesses adjust their work-from-home policies and adopt reduced travel plans in response to COVID-19, were helping to ensure that all globally distributed teams can still reliably meet face to face, even if employees are not in the same location.

The premium tier of Microsoft Teams, which was initially available in China with certain limitations, will be now available to users globally. Starting March 10, Microsoft also plans to remove member restrictions and will let users schedule video calls and conferences.

At Microsoft, the health and safety of employees, customers, partners and communities is our top priority. By making Teams available to all for free for six months, we hope that we can support public health and safety by making remote work even easier, Microsofts EVP JP Courtois tweeted.

The move comes after a number of major technology conferences, including both Microsoft and Googles developer events, as well as Mobile World Congress, have been called off due to the coronavirus threat.

Similarly, companies like Twitter, Facebook, Stripe, Slack, and Square have asked their employees to work remotely and also avoid non-essential travel.

Via: The Verge

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Google and Microsoft offer free teleconferencing tools to combat coronavirus - TechRadar

Huawei

As Huawei counts down the days to the launch of its latest smartphone, the P40 Pro, its loss of Google continues to take a huge toll. The Google/Huawei back and forth has dominated the U.S. blacklist headlines, and has resulted in the Chinese giant working up its Huawei Mobile Services replacement for Google, which includes a fully-featured app store and underlying services such as navigation.

What hasnt been on the cards yet has been search. And why would it? Any browser can quickly access search engines of choice, as long as access to those engines are not restricted. But search is obviously much more integrated than just browser home pages now. News, weather, travel, mediawe see the results of those engines stitched through our devices. The power in the hands of Google, particularly, has driven phenomenal financial success, but also responsibility for influencing the content that many of us now see first and foremost day by day.

And so the surprise news leaking out of Huawei this week is hugeHuawei Search is on its way, and will soon launch as part of the Huawei ecosystem. Not only does this represent a further business risk to Google from the ongoing technology split, east versus west, but it also raises some significant questions around who curates and filters our news. Huawei is the second largest supplier of smartphones worldwide, its global audience stretches way beyond Chinas borders.

There are clear implications for a Chinese company, subject to Chinas laws on content and censorship, filtering news for users around the world. Last month, by way of example, Chinese social media outlets, as well as Baidu, its leading search engine, were subject to state controls over publishing coronavirus information. While western platforms are also subject to censorship inside China, the question as to the pressure applied to a Chinese companys news outside China is unclear.

Reddit: r/Huawei. Posted by beingnull

The team at XDA-Developers tested Huawei Search, reporting that is is a basic search app that just lets you input a query to search the Internet for webpages, videos, news articles, or images. But, by way of example, the weather data is powered by Huafeng-AccuWeather, a joint venture thatapparently sources forecast data from the China Meteorological Administration.

There is no data available as to the source of the wider search results, we couldnt match search results from Huawei Search with results from Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Ask, or AOL. The software is licensed from Huaweis Irish subsidiary and appears to comply with relevant GDPR regulations around removing search data. XDA-Developers concluded that it would be premature to say that Huawei Search is an alternative to Google search or Microsoft Bing, but theres a possibility that this service could evolve into a decent competitor down the line.

This isnt a mapping app, its not a new front-end for our email or a payment processing engine. This is a potential filter that sits atop the World Wide Web, serving up content for hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Whether or not you believe the U.S. allegations that Huawei is controlled by the Chinese state, that it is subsidised and subject to Beijings national security laws, it is unarguably a company based in the most highly censored country on the planet.

Until now, this story has focused on the dedicated Huawei Search app. But behind that app sits a range of search engines and related services. And it is the prospect of those engines and their results being stitched into the Huawei operating systems front-end that is more of a potential concern than the app itself.

I have commented before on the unintended consequences of the U.S. blacklistGoogle and the U.S. losing their global influence on mobile standards, the launch of a third-way competitor to full-fat Android and iOS, the potential for Huawei to carve itself a dominant position overseeing that new alternative. This search news is a material further step in this, and from a transparency perspective has worrying implications. There is also the fact that search related data would be captured from the search history of those users.

If you want to see for yourself, Huawei Central has published a link to download Huawei Search, even though you will not find this app on AppGallery because its still under internal testing and not launched publicly.

In the meantime, Google has reportedly applied for a U.S. Commerce Department license to restore its supply lines to Huawei. This would return its software and services to the Chinese giants Android users worldwide. And if that happens there will be a different question: Which of Huaweis alternative apps and offerings will be shut down, restricted to China or carried as alternatives on its devices?

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This Is Huaweis Alarming New Surprise For Google: Heres Why You Should Be Concerned - Forbes

In emerging markets, up to 80% of the population may have to rely on informally-run public transport to get around. Literally, privately-run buses and cars. But journey-planning apps that work well for commuters in developed markets like New York or London do not work well in emerging markets, which is why you cant just flip open an app like Citymapper in Lagos, Nigeria. Furthermore, mobility is a fundamental driver of social, political, and economic growth. If you cannot get around, you cant grow as a country, so its pretty important for these emerging economies.

WhereIsMyTransport specialises in mapping these formal and informal public transport networks in emerging markets. They have mapped 34 cities in Africa and are mapping cities in India, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Its integrated mobility API includes proprietary algorithms, features and capabilities designed for complex transit networks in these emerging markets.

Its now raised a $7.5 million Series A funding round led by Liil Ventures, that also includes returning investors Global Innovation Fund and Goodwell Investments, plus new strategic investment from Google, Nedbank, and Toyota Tsusho Corporation (TTC).

The platform now has more than 750,000 km of routes in 39 cities and the new strategic investment will drive further international expansion.

Devin de Vries, said: We make the invisible visible, by collecting all kinds of data related to public transport and turning the data into information that can be shared with the people who need it most. In emerging markets, the mobility ecosystem is complex; informal public transport doesnt behave like formal public transport. Data and technology solutions that work well in London or San Francisco wouldnt make anything like the same impact, if any at all, in the cities where we work. Our solutions are designed specifically to overcome these contextual challenges.

Mr. Masato Yamanami, Automotive Divisions CEO of Toyota Tsusho Corporation, also said that our divisions global network, that covers 146 countries, is primarily focused on new emerging countries where people rely on informal public transport. Through strategic collaboration with WhereIsMyTransport, we will develop better and more efficient mobility services that help to resolve social challenges and contribute to the overall economic development of nations, primarily emerging nations.

Finally, Alix Peterson Zwane, Chief Executive Officer of Global Innovation Fund, said: Informal and often unreliable mass transit is a significant problem that disproportionately affects poor people. We are excited to continue to work with WhereIsMyTransport to make mass transportation in emerging cities more accessible and more efficient.

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Google, Toyota Tsusho invest in WhereIsMyTransport to map transport in emerging cities - TechCrunch

Google is releasing a new hardware product called Coral. While it looks like a Raspberry Pi clone, Coral is a lot more ambitious. According to Google, it will make artificial intelligence more accessible to the public than ever before. Here's what you need to know.

Coral is described by Google as a complete ecosystem of products for developers hoping to create their own AI systems. It provides a range of products offering users the chance to prototype their AI codes and even produce them. It's been in beta mode for months but Google has finally released a final version to the public.

Previously, AI has been reserved for researchers and developers working in labs so this launch might finally push would-be developers and AI amateurs into eventually producing their ideas for wider audiences.

Google has provided some examples of projects the technology has been used for and which products and codes you'll need to give it a shot yourself. One example is a Smart Bird Feeder, which using Coral's AI-enabling products, identifies which birds are visiting the feeder and even deters other non-bird animals like squirrels.

Making an AI system will still require a lot of coding knowledge so before you jump in thinking you can switch a few words around and build the next Sophia the Robot, think again.

Google is marketing this product to developers already working with AI prototypes that would like to test and produce ideas they might not be able to in their work facilities. If you have some knowledge of coding, however, Google also provides some example codes to get you started.

The Coral lineup is not yet available for Australians but Google has said it intends to expand its market here in the coming months. It's also looking to provide Coral for people living in New Zealand, India, Thailand, Singapore, Oman, Ghana and the Philippines by that same deadline.

This article has been updated since its original publication.

Artificial intelligence is infiltrating our daily lives, with applications that curate your phone pics, manage your email, and translate text from any language into another. Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft are all heavily researching how to integrate AI into their major services. Soon you'll likely interact with an AI (or its output) every time you pick up your phone. Should you trust it? Not always.

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What Is Google Coral And Do You Need It? - Lifehacker Australia

Google is preventing employees from traveling to Italy, Iran, Japan, and South Korea because of outbreaks of the novel coronavirus, Business Insider reported. Amazon is asking employees to defer all nonessential travel, a spokesperson confirmed to The Verge, which includes domestic travel within the US.

Both companies had already halted employee travel to China, and Google temporarily closed down its offices in China at the end of January.

A Google employee in Zurich, Switzerland, has the novel coronavirus, a spokesperson confirmed to The Verge. They were in the Zurich office for a limited time, before they had any symptoms, the spokesperson said in an email.

Amazon senior vice president Dave Clark wrote in an email that employees should not schedule meetings that call for travel until at least the end of April, The New York Times reported. The company is one of the leading buyers of corporate air travel, and it booked $220 million in flights in 2017.

Amazon is also canceling all on-site interviews for job candidates, Gizmodo reported. Interviews will be held over video chat.

There are currently over 83,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, worldwide. China has the largest number of cases, but outbreaks are escalating in countries like Japan and South Korea, which now has over 2,300 confirmed cases and 13 deaths.

The tech industry has seen significant impact from the ongoing outbreaks, including store closures across China and production delays. Organizers canceled Mobile World Congress after companies like Amazon, ZTE, and Sony pulled out, and Facebook canceled the in-person portion of its annual F8 developer conference.

Update February 28, 4:20PM ET: Updated with additional information on Amazons interview policy.

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Google and Amazon limit employees travel because of coronavirus fears - The Verge