Category Archives: Google

Andrea Bonfiglio and other Triple T Hospitality Group owners that manage Tio Taco and Tequila Bar said they were completely unaware of the Google review quota policy put in place by a "rogue" manager at their Edison location (per Yahoo! News). Once they saw the post, they removed the policy, informed employees that they wouldn't be held to the quota, and fired the general manager and assistant manager at the location. Unfortunately, the damage was already done.

The posted policy requiring employees to get at least five 5-star Google reviews per month to maintain employment was not well received by the internet. The viral Reddit post that garnered 1,700 comments has now been removed, and the taco bar's Yelp page is being monitored after being tagged with an "unusual activity alert." Most followers who weighed in on the issue voiced their frustration with unrealistic expectations set by managers to gain reviews that were coaxed instead of earned. Despite Bonfiglio stating that the management group did not instate the policy and agree that it is "insane," very few comments mention the violent backlash experienced by the owner and her family.

Google reviews rate Tio Taco and Tequila Bar with 4.4 stars, and almost every review, whether it's positive or negative, seems to be answered by the owner. Google must have done a little housekeeping of its own, as there are no longer reviews mentioning the restaurant's defunct policy.

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How A Google Review Policy Led To Threats Against A Restaurant Chain Owner - Tasting Table

Google is working on a lower-end Chromecast with Google TV that would slot in below its current model in price and also video resolution. According to Protocols Janko Roettgers, the upcoming, cheaper Chromecast will run the same Google TV software as the existing hardware and will still include a remote control. But it will be limited to a maximum of 1080p video quality.

Playing to that limitation, Protocol believes Google might market the device as Chromecast HD with Google TV, similar to the branding of Apples Apple TV HD. The product would be marketed towards consumers with 1080p TVs who dont necessarily care about having the very best picture quality. Other specs mentioned in the report include a maximum of 2GB RAM and 60fps frame rate and confirmation that the hardware would be capable of decoding Googles preferred AV1 codec.

With the 2020 Chromecast with Google TV priced at $49.99, potential price points for the HD version could range anywhere from $19.99 to $39.99. The entry-level streaming hardware market is fiercely competitive, with multiple models to choose between from Amazon and Roku alone; clearly, Google wants in on that pool of potential customers.

The only thing that would give me pause about a lower-end Chromecast with Google TV would be performance. The current model can already get bogged down from time to time, so, hopefully, Google can deliver a device that sacrifices resolution without ruining the day-to-day experience of browsing streaming recommendations and apps.

This new Chromecast HD with Google TV would likely replace the aging, older-generation Chromecast that Google continues to sell for $29.99 despite it coming without any built-in entertainment apps or a remote. Like its predecessors, the standard Chromecast relies on users to stream content from another device like their smartphone or PC to the HDMI dongle. Google TV is a much simpler approach that offers a vast app store, voice search, Google Assistant integration, and more.

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Google could bring the fight to Roku and Amazon with an even cheaper Chromecast - The Verge

I know, I know, youre tired of Wordle. Just mute the word wordle on Twitter and dont be like the guy who made a Wordle-spoiling bot and got banned from Twitter today for being a party pooper (actually, its because its against Twitter guidelines to make a bot that is designed to bother people, but thats some definitively party-pooping behavior).

Okay, now that were alone all the curmudgeons have closed out of the article lets talk about Wordle. Todays puzzle was particularly challenging, but when you typed wordle into the Google search bar to find that strange powerlanguage.co.uk website, you might have noticed a fun Easter egg. The Google icon in the upper right corner looks like Wordle! The animation even enacts someone guessing words like column and goalie before arriving at Google. Its cute, okay! (And in other news, Google is being sued by Washington, DC and three states over a user privacy issue.)

As the cultural significance of a Google Easter egg proves, Wordle is still very popular, and its not just on your Twitter feed. When TechCrunch spoke to the games creator Josh Wardle two weeks ago, he said that two million people were playing the game each day. If youre decidedly not a curmudgeon and still think Wordle is fun (It is! If you dont like it, just dont play!), check out our conversation with Wardle (yep, thats his name) about the games sudden virality, venture capital interest and why he doesnt want to monetize the game.

Wardle told TechCrunch:

Its not like I think that everyone needs to give away the things they create online for free, it was just that because thats how I started this, its made it easier for me to continue it this way. I made something that felt really authentic to me, and now when people are asking like, Do you want to monetize it? Why arent you doing X, Y and Z?

Its really easy for me to say No, I was really happy with it when it was just my partner and me playing together. Its really easy to get seduced by all that stuff, but I try and instead be like I was happy then, and I think Ill be happy in the future if thats where it ends. If at the end of the day with Wordle, its just her and me playing again, I think Ill be totally happy for that to be the outcome.

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Google has a Wordle Easter egg and its cute, okay - TechCrunch

There have been rumblings for quite some time that Google has been beavering away on its own smartwatch. Rumors last month suggested a Google-branded watch could arrive sometime in 2022, and now we have a slightly clearer idea of when it might debut.

Leaker Jon Prosser said the watch is currently slated to arrive on May 26th, noting that this is "the first weve seen a set date on the device behind the scenes." While that seems on the surface like an oddly specific date for something so far away, the timing lines up with the Google I/O developer conference, which usually takes place in May.

As with most smartwatches in the Android ecosystem, the smartwatch is expected to have a circular face, albeit with no physical bezel. It will likely have a heart rate sensor and other features adopted from Fitbit, which Google bought last year. The device could show off the extent of what Wear OS can do and be positioned as an Apple Watch competitor.

The release date isn't set in stone, of course. Nor is the name of the device, despite suggestions that it'll be called Pixel Watch. Still, it's something for Android and Pixel enthusiasts to keep an eye on.

Other rumors suggest a Pixel 6a smartphone is coming in May as well. It's expected to use the same Tensor chipset as the Pixel 6, though Google could ditch the headphone jack in the budget model.

All products recommended by Engadget are selected by our editorial team, independent of our parent company. Some of our stories include affiliate links. If you buy something through one of these links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

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Google's long-rumored smartwatch could arrive on May 26th - Engadget

Tech giant Google on Monday announced plans to open a new office in Pune in the second half of 2022. Google's Pune facility will help it build advanced enterprise cloud technologies in collaboration with global engineering teams, provide real-time technical advice, and deliver product and implementation expertise that customers turn to Google Cloud.

Im pleased to share that Google is opening an office in Pune, and the first Googlers in the space will be in our Cloud Product Engineering, Technical Support and Global Delivery Center organizations," said Anil Bhansali, VP of Cloud Engineering, India, Google Cloud.

Google said it has kicked off hiring, alongside rapidly growing teams in Gurugram, Hyderabad and Bengaluru.

This new location is expected to open in the second half of 2022 but our hiring starts now alongside our rapidly growing teams in Gurgaon, Hyderabad and Bangalore," Bhansali writes in a Google blog post.

This planned expansion is the latest in a series of investments by Google Cloud to fuel our customer growth and valued offerings to organizations of all sizes."

Interested candidates can visit the official portal of Google vacancies to find out more about the open roles.

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Google starts hiring IT professionals for its new office in Pune - Mint

GREENVILLE, NC(WNCT) It thats time of year for you to enjoy yourfavorite Girl Scout cookies. Google is alerting us to the ones we like the most and where we can get them.

This season there will be a newly released cookie,Adventurefuls.These cookies are a caramel and brownie combo that youre sure to quickly fall in love with. Also, Google has released trends for each states top searched cookies.

According to Google,Thin Mints are the most searchedcookiesof all time. Last week, according to Google, the search for Girl Scout Cookies Near Me increased 450%. Google broke down the search results among some of the top cities in the United States, including Durham.

Heres what they found were the most popular cookies:

Some other interesting locations in the South included Charleston, S.C.:

In Atlanta, the top searches were:

Sorry, no Google results for Greenville.

However, that hasnt stopped many people who are excited to get their orders in or stop by a spot where they are being sold. In fact, through a partnership with Doordash, you can have cookies delivered to where you live and work.

The search ofdoesdooordashdeliver Girl Scout cookies increased 2,600% on Google just recently.

Girl Scout Cookies went on sale earlier this month. If you want information on how you can order them through the Girl Scout app, click here.

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Girl Scout cookies are always trending (yum). Heres what Google says are some of our favorite choices - WNCT

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai gestures during a session at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, on January 22, 2020.

FABRICE COFFRINI | AFP | Getty Images

Four attorneys general are suing Google for allegedly misleading users about when the company was able to track their location.

The bipartisan group of attorneys general from the District of Columbia, Indiana, Texas and Washington allege in separate lawsuits filed Monday that Google deceived users from at least 2014 to 2019 by leading them to believe that turning off Location History settings would make the service stop tracking their locations. But, the AGs allege, a user's location could still be tracked by Google unless they also turned off settings in the Web & App Activity section.

Google describes Web & App Activity as a way to personalize experiences for users by saving searches and activity in a user's account.

The AGs allege that Google misled users to believe that once they turned their Location History off, their location would not longer be tracked.

"Yet, even when consumers explicitly opted out of location tracking by turning Location History off, Google nevertheless recorded consumers' locations via other means," the Washington lawsuit alleges. "Although Web & App Activity setting is automatically enabled for all Google Accounts, the Company's disclosures during Google Account creation did not mention or draw consumers' attention to the setting until 2018."

A 2018 report from the Associated Press revealed the basis of the allegations in the lawsuits.

The AGs allege that Google profited from the deception by fueling its advertising business with such data. The lawsuits specifically request the court to require Google to offload any algorithms created with the allegedly ill-gotten gains, alongside monetary profits.

Google didn't immediately provide a statement but pointed to comments a judge in a similar case brought by Arizona's attorney general made.

"A reasonable fact finder could find that a reasonable, or even an unsophisticated, consumer, would understand that at least some location information is collected through means other than LH," the judge wrote in a recent filing, referring to Location History.

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Four AGs sue Google for allegedly tracking you without permission - CNBC

In 1998, a computer science PhD student called Larry Page submitted a patent for internet search based on an obscure piece of mathematics. The method, known today as PageRank, allowed the most relevant webpages to be found much more rapidly and accurately than ever before. The patent, initially owned by Stanford, was sold in 2005 for shares that are today worth more than $1bn. Pages company, Google, has a net worth of well over $1tr.

It wasnt Page, or Googles cofounder Sergey Brin, who created the mathematics described in the patent. The equation they used is at least 100 years old, building on properties of matrices (mathematical structures akin to a spreadsheet of numbers). Similar methods were used by Chinese mathematicians more than two millennia ago. Page and Brins insight was to realise that by calculating what is known as the stationary distribution of a matrix describing connections on the world wide web, they could find the most popular sites more rapidly.

Applying the correct equation can suddenly solve an important practical problem, and completely change the world we live in.

The PageRank story is neither the first nor the most recent example of a little-known piece of mathematics transforming tech. In 2015, three engineers used the idea of gradient descent, dating back to the French mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy in the mid-19th century, to increase the time viewers spent watching YouTube by 2,000%. Their equation transformed the service from a place we went to for a few funny clips to a major consumer of our viewing time.

From the 1990s onwards, the financial industry has been built on variations of the diffusion equation, attributed to a variety of mathematicians including Einstein. Professional gamblers make use of logistic regression, developed by the Oxford statistician Sir David Cox in the 50s, to ensure they win at the expense of those punters who are less maths-savvy.

There is good reason to expect that there are more billion-dollar equations out there: generations-old mathematical theorems with the potential for new applications. The question is where to look for the next one.

A few candidates can be found in mathematical work in the latter part of the 20th century. One comes in the form of fractals, patterns that are self-similar, repeating on many different levels, like the branches of a tree or the shape of a broccoli head. Mathematicians developed a comprehensive theory of fractals in the 80s, and there was some excitement about applications that could store data more efficiently. Interest died out until recently, when a small community of computer scientists started showing how mathematical fractals can produce the most amazing, weird and wonderful patterns.

Another field of mathematics still looking for a money-making application is chaos theory, the best-known example of which is the butterfly effect: if a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon, we need to know about it in order to predict a storm in the North Atlantic. More generally, the theory tells us that, in order to accurately predict storms (or political events), we need to know about every tiny air disturbance on the entire planet. An impossible task. But chaos theory also points towards repeatable patterns. The Lorenz attractor is a model of the weather that, despite being chaotic, does produce somewhat regular and recognisable patterns. Given the uncertainty of the times we live in, it may be time to revive these ideas.

Some of my own research has focused on self-propelled particle models, which describe movements similar to those of bird flocks and fish schools. I now apply these models to better coordinate tactical formations in football and to scout players who move in ways that create more space for themselves and their teammates.

Another related model is current reinforced random walks, which capture how ants build trails, and the structure of slime mould transportation networks. This model could take us from todays computers which have central processing units (CPUs) that make computations and separate memory chips to store information to new forms of computation in which computation and memory are part of the same process. Like ant trails and slime mould, these new computers would benefit from being decentralised. Difficult computational problems, in particular in AI and computer vision, could be broken down in to smaller sub-problems and solved more rapidly.

Whenever there is a breakthrough application of an equation, we see a whole range of copycat imitations. The current boom in artificial intelligence is primarily driven by just two equations gradient descent and logistic regression put together to create what is known as a neural network. But history shows that the next big leap forward doesnt come from repeatedly using the same mathematical trick. It comes instead from a completely new idea, read from the more obscure pages of the book of mathematics.

The challenge of finding the next billion-dollar equation is not simply one of knowing every page of that book. Page spotted the right problem to solve at the right time, and he persuaded the more theoretically inclined Brin to help him find the maths to help them. You dont need to be a mathematical genius yourself in order to put the subject to good use. You just need to have a feeling for what equations are, and what they can and cant do.

Mathematics still holds many hidden intellectual and financial riches. It is up to all of us to try to find them. The search for the next billion-dollar equation is on.

David Sumpter is professor of applied mathematics at the University of Uppsala, Sweden, and author of The Ten Equations that Rule the World: And How You Can Use Them Too

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Equations built giants like Google. Wholl find the next billion-dollar bit of maths? - The Guardian

Google Health formally disbanded last year, with the unit instead choosing to spread its efforts across the organization. In this iteration, the company is working to imbue each of its numerous divisions with health expertise, Google chief medical officer Karen DeSalvo said during the Axios Pro kickoff event.

Why it matters: Google isnt backing away from health, but rather deepening its investment in the category by infusing its work into virtually every sector of the company, from wearables to partnerships with hospitals and health systems.

Behind the scenes: Many of those divisions resulted from health and wellness acquisitions, so it will be interesting to see how Google continues to bring them into the larger company fold.

Details: Wearables are also part of a broader suite of sensing devices, DeSalvo says, so when we work with a health plan, they're thinking about how to bring those tools to bear for customers, because people want digital-first, but also digital sensing. So we're increasingly looking for ways we can be helpful to health systems to give personalized insights to their customers.

Erin co-authors the Axios Pro newsletter on health tech deals. Subscribe at AxiosPro.com.

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The latest iteration of Dr. Google - Axios

Google is launching a limited beta of its app to bring Android games to Windows PCs. Google Play Games will be available in beta in Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan today, allowing Windows PC owners to play popular Android games like Mobile Legends, Summoners War, State of Survival, and Three Kingdoms Tactics.

Players in Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan will be able to sign up to access the beta and access Googles standalone app on Windows PCs. Google is promising seamless gameplay sessions between a phone, tablet, Chromebook, and Windows PC, suggesting that youll be able to easily resume games between multiple devices.

Players can easily browse, download, and play their favorite mobile games on their PCs while taking advantage of larger screens with mouse and keyboard inputs, says Arjun Dayal, group product manager for Google Play Games. No more losing your progress or achievements when switching between devices; it just works with your Google Play Games profile!

Google Play Games will also include Play Points that can be earned while playing Android games on PCs. Google only announced its plans to bring Android games to PCs a month ago, but its still not clear what technology the company is using to get Android games running on Windows PCs. The Google Play Games app will be a native Windows app that wont involve game streaming, though, and Google is opening up a developer site today that should start to provide more information for game developers.

Googles announcement comes months after Microsoft started testing Android apps on Windows 11 PCs. Microsoft has built an underlying Windows Subsystem for Android, which is capable of running Android apps from a variety of sources. Microsoft uses it in partnership with Amazon to allow native installs of games and apps from the Amazon Appstore on Windows, but despite workarounds, Google Play isnt officially supported yet.

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Google launches beta of Android games on Windows PCs - The Verge