Jan 30
Amid the news that Lenovo had indeed purchased Motorola from Google this week, the tips and suggestions for their next steps have flown in. In a chat with the Wall … Continue reading
Jan 30
Google has been bumping into pockets of privacy violations across the globe recently, the latest of which has taken place in South Korea. This follows a recent issue in Canada, … Continue reading
Jan 30
Ricoh Theta camera update brings spherical image uploading to Google Maps and Plus
Posted in: Today's ChiliSpherical panorama images have become a popular stitching activity among photo-takers, and as a result some smartphones and applications have cropped up that can make them. The process can still … Continue reading
Jan 30
I don’t have a crystal ball, so it’s hard for me to see into the future like some. But the writing appears to be on the wall in the technology … Continue reading
Jan 30
It would appear that the idea of capturing every single thing you do – aka “life logging” has permeated the likes of Samsung. They’ve had an app leak today that’s … Continue reading
Jan 30
Google has quietly introduced a hard case for its Glass headset, addressing a design issue notorious among early-adopters of the headset where the right arm could easily snap, even when … Continue reading
Jan 30
You can make all kinds of guesses about why Google sold Motorola. Did it only want the patents all along? Is it making nice with Samsung? But a more pressing question has been weighing on our minds: "So uh… what about the Moto X?"
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Jan 30
Lenovo’s aspirations for an established mobile handset company goes back a few years. According to a report published by the WSJ, Lenovo competed with Google for Motorola Mobility in 2011. Then just last October Lenovo submitted an offer for BlackBerry. That deal also fell through.
However, Lenovo’s search ended last Thanksgiving when Google Chairman Eric Schmidt called Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo’s chairman and chief executive, and asked if he was still interested in Motorola.
“And I said yes”, Yang told the WSJ. “This was a longtime love story.”
The story goes that Yang and Lenovo’s CFO attempted to acquire Motorola’s handset division in 2011. The pair visited company executives in Chicago. But they met with the co-CEO of the systems business, not the handset business Lenovo was after.
Google went on to purchase Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in 2012.
Following that purchase, Yang invited Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt over for dinner. “I told him if they really want to run a hardware business, they could keep it. If they are not interested in the hardware business, they could sell Motorola to us,” he said, according to the WSJ.
This deal is similar in nature to when Lenovo acquired IBM’s PC division in 2005. The purchase gives Lenovo access to a historic brand and a vast support network that includes engineers, manufacturing rights and a struggling, but established brand. Lenovo reportedly does not plan on laying off any of Motorola’s 3,500 employees.
In a conference call yesterday, Yang said Lenovo expects to sell 100 million handsets the year after the purchase is complete. It’s a lofty goal by any measure, but, with Lenovo’s global reach and dominance in their home country of China, a goal that is certainly obtainable.
Jan 29
Google today sold Motorola to Lenovo for $2.91 billion. While many speculated that Google would release phones after it bought Motorola in 2011, it didn’t happen — Motorola remained a partner like other Android OEMs. Recently, Google acquired Nest, and TechCrunch has learned that Google has big plans for the team behind the connected device company.
Google will keep the Nest group intact inside the company. The new division will still work on hardware devices, but not necessarily thermostats or smoke detectors. In fact, Google would like Fadell to work on gadgets that make more sense for the company. Will it be a phone or a tablet? It’s unclear for now.
While Nest first became popular with its thermostats, Google didn’t buy the company for these devices. First and foremost, the company wanted to snatch the great product team.
Nest founder and CEO Tony Fadell used to work for Apple on the iPod and was a founding member of the iPhone development team. Many people working in hardware consider him one of the best executives that understand both hardware and software — he is comfortable working at the intersection of the two.
Moreover, Fadell managed to attract great Apple engineers when he started working on Nest. They wanted to follow Fadell’s plans and were good engineers. And that’s exactly what Google was looking for when it acquired Nest.
When it comes to budget, Google is willing to let the Nest team use as many resources as it needs. In other words, the company is getting serious about consumer hardware, and Motorola was just a false start.
Google will keep Motorola’s patents, and it seems pretty clear now that Google only wanted that from the get-go.
Acquiring Nest and selling Motorola now make more sense when you put these two things side by side. Something was missing with Motorola. With Nest, Google finally has the right team and mindset to create and produce gadgets.
Jan 29
This article was written on September 14, 2007 by CyberNet.
Google most certainly has a fascination with the space beyond the atmosphere of the Earth. After all, they recently launched the new addition to Google Earth called Google Sky (a virtual telescope), and they routinely work closely with NASA on various projects. Now they’re getting involved in outer-space another way, through a robotic race to the moon which they’re sponsoring called Google Lunar X Prize. The winner of the race will receive a whopping $20 million dollar prize with a $5 million dollar second prize, and $5 million in bonus prizes.
Getting a robot to the moon is no easy task, and Google along with the X Prize Foundation realize this. That’s why the first place prize can be awarded anytime between now and December 31st, 2012 – over 5 years from now. To obtain the first place prize, a team "must successfully soft land a privately funded spacecraft on the Moon, rove on the lunar surface for a minimum of 500 meters, and transmit a specific set of video, images, and data back to Earth." If no one is able to accomplish that task before the given date, the award will drop to $15 million until December 31st, 2014 when the contest would end.
After Google announced the race to the moon, Gearlog sat down with Google co-founder Larry Page to ask him about visiting space. He was asked if the race would be a "fulfillment of childhood fantasies" to which Page responded that he’d love to go to space. He said "I think everyone wants to go into space… if it’s easy, efficient, and affordable." Page was also asked how Google could contribute to this race other than sponsoring it, and he said "Our engineers are really excited about this. They put up this Moon product; you can see the old Apollo data really well, and that’s just great – as our technologists get excited about things…"
It makes sense now why Google launched a new version of Google Moon without the cheese. Remember the cheese? Not too long ago Google’s sense of humor was found on the surface of the moon. If you zoomed it as far as you could – this is what you’d see:
No joking anymore! Getting to the moon is serious business now, and Google along with the X Prize Foundation are hoping that this international competition will end up introducing us to low-cost ways of getting robots into space for exploration. As XPGeek said in the forum, the last time we were at the moon was "almost 40 years ago. That’s the farthest we have gone, and we haven’t been back since." I think it’s about time, don’t you?
Source: Reuters
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