Google building self-check website for coronavirus

United States President Donald Trump announced Friday that internet giant Alphabet is creating a website where people will be able to check whether they have symptoms of the novel coronavirus.

Verily Life Sciences, once a project in a Google X lab devoted to “moonshot” projects and now its own health business unit, is testing a “tool to help triage individuals for COVID-19 testing,” Google confirmed on Twitter.

Statement from Verily: "We are developing a tool to help triage individuals for Covid-19 testing. Verily is in the early stages of development, and planning to roll testing out in the Bay Area, with the hope of expanding more broadly over time.

Google Communications (@Google_Comms) March 13, 2020

“Verily is in the early stages of development, and planning to roll testing out in the Bay Area, with the hope of expanding more broadly over time,” the tweet said, referring to San Francisco and surrounding communities.

Trump thanked Google while declaring a state of national emergency due to the deadly coronavirus pandemic.


Google is helping to develop a website “to determine whether a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location,” Trump said.

Google has a large team of engineers devoted to the project, and has made significant progress, according to Trump.

“Our overriding goal is to stop the spread of the virus and help all Americans impacted by this,” Trump said.

“Again, we don’t want everybody taking this test. It is totally unnecessary. And this will pass.”


A launch date for the website should be known by late Sunday, according to Vice President Mike Pence.

“You can go to the website, type in your symptoms and be given direction whether or not a test is indicated,” Pence said.

The website will then direct users to locations where they can obtain drive-through testing, he said.

San Francisco has begun setting up temporary, drive-through coronavirus testing locations.

Agence France-Presse

Alphabet overtakes Apple as world’s most valuable company

SAN FRANCISCO— Alphabet now comes before Apple atop the list of the world’s most valuable companies.

The shift occurred in Monday’s extended trading after Alphabet, Google’s new parent company, released a fourth-quarter earnings report that highlighted the robust growth of the digital ad market. Apple Inc.’s iPhone, meanwhile, is suffering its first downturn since it debuted eight years ago.

Alphabet Inc. earned $4.9 billion on revenue of $21.3 billion in the fourth quarter. If not for employee stock expenses and certain other items, Alphabet said it would have earned $8.67 per share. That figure easily topped the average estimate of $8.10 per share among analysts surveyed by FactSet.

The report provided the most detailed breakdown yet on the profits pouring in from Google’s dominant search engine and ad network. (Google reorganized itself under Alphabet last October.) Investors pushed up Alphabet stock $36.88, or nearly 5 percent, to $807.65 in extended trading.

Based on that after-hours bump, Alphabet’s market value stood at $555 billion while Apple’s was at $534 billion, based on the most recent regulatory filings showing the company’s outstanding shares. The rankings could quickly change again in regular trading Tuesday.

Apple’s stock has been sliding amid concerns over slowing iPhone sales. Meanwhile, Alphabet’s stock has surged by 45 percent since the end of 2014 when it was still trading under Google’s name.

The fourth-quarter report marks the first time Alphabet has spelled out the costs of running still-experimental businesses that are trying to do everything from eliminating human drivers to curing cancer.

Until now, Google chose to hide the expense of running those peripheral operations in its financial statement. The company’s opaque accounting made it difficult to know just how much profit Google reaped from its primary business — selling digital ads next to everything from search results to YouTube videos.

In the fourth quarter, Google produced an operating profit of $6.8 billion on revenue of $17.1 billion, after subtracting ad commissions. That translates into a whopping profit margin of 40 percent. Apple registered an operating profit margin of 32 percent in its most recent quarter.

Meanwhile, Alphabet’s other companies together produced an operating loss of $1.2 billion on revenue of just $151 million. Alphabet labels that category “other bets.” For the full year, Alphabet’s other companies lost $3.6 billion on revenue of $448 million.

The optimism surrounding Alphabet stems in part from hopes that the company is developing more financial discipline as it discloses more earnings details. Google had become known for its free-spending habits and reluctance to share information with analysts.

The change in sentiment coincided with Google’s hiring of a new chief financial officer, Ruth Porat, last May. Porat, a Wall Street veteran, has consistently signaled her intent to rein in spending.

Under the previous setup at Google, “things had always been a little muddy,” said Edward Jones analyst Josh Olson. “The hope now is that management will continue to show greater cost discipline.”

Google is also counting on advertisers to gradually pay more for marketing messages on smartphones. They still aren’t paying as much for mobile ads as on personal computers because ads on smaller smartphone screens strike many as less valuable. That’s one reason Google’s average ad rates, measured as “cost per click,” have been declining for more than four years.

In the latest quarter, Google’s cost per click fell by 13 percent from the same time in 2014. But Porat cited in increase in mobile search requests as one of biggest reasons that Google’s revenue rose by 18 percent from the previous year. As people increasingly search for information and shop on their phones, the company expects advertisers to ramp up their spending on smartphones, too.

source: business.inquirer.net

Google gets 348,085 ‘forget’ requests in Europe

SAN FRANCISCO, United States—Since a top European court ruled people have a right to be forgotten online, Google has received 348,085 requests for tidbits to vanish from search results.

Silicon Valley-based Google, a subsidiary of newly-created parent company Alphabet, complied with less that half of the demands, basing decisions on criteria intended to balance privacy with the public’s right to know.

A report released on Wednesday by Google showed that the top country for requests was France, where the Internet giant is in a standoff with data protection officials.

A European Court of Justice ruling in May 2014 recognizing the “right to be forgotten” on the net opened the door for Google users to ask the search engine to remove results about them that are inaccurate or no longer relevant.

Google set up an online form that people in Europe can fill out to ask for information to be excluded from search results.

Similar processes have been put in place to ask to be forgotten by Microsoft’s Bing search engine that also powers queries at Yahoo.

It is the Internet companies themselves who get to decide which requests to grant.

Microsoft previously disclosed that in the first half of this year it got 3,546 requests that online information be forgotten by Bing, granting half of them.

In the report released on Wednesday, Google said that right-to-be-forgotten requests have targeted slightly more than 1.23 million Internet pages (URLs), and that it agreed to remove 42 percent of them from online search results in Europe.

Some crimes vanish

France was the country with the top number of requests, accounting for 73,399 applications aimed at nearly a quarter of a million URLs, followed by Germany with 60,198 requests concerning 220,589 URLs.

In both countries, about 48 percent of the unwanted links were eliminated from Google search results, according to the report.

Meanwhile, the report indicated that Google granted about 38 percent of the 43,101 requests submitted in the United Kingdom; 37 percent of the 33,106 requests in Spain, and just shy of 30 percent of the 26,186 requests made in fifth-placed Italy.

Google said it complied with nearly 46 percent of the 10,121 requests in Belgium, nearly 41 percent of the 9,687 requests in Sweden, and about 45 percent of the 8,339 requests in Switzerland.

A Google outline of scenarios leading to information being forgotten in searches included pages with content solely about someone’s health, race, religion or sexual orientation.

Common causes for “delisting” pages also included criminal convictions regarding children or stories focusing on criminal charges that were subsequently overturned by courts.

Google said that it had endorsed requests from crime victims or their families to remove from search results news reports of rapes, murders or other assaults.

“We may decline to delist if we determined that the page contains information which is strongly in the public interest,” Google said in an online post.

“Determining whether content is in the public interest is complex and may mean considering many diverse factors.”

The list of factors included whether content relates to the petitioner’s professional life, a past crime, political office, position in public life, or whether the content itself is self-authored content, government documents, or journalistic in nature, according to Google.

Social network memories

Facebook was the top online spot where people wanted information forgotten from searches, with a total of 10,220 URLs removed, according to Google.

The second most common venue for removals was profileengine.com, with 7,986 links to the people-focused search engine removed from Google search results, the report indicated.

The list of Top 10 sites for URLs to be forgotten included Google Groups, YouTube, Badoo, Annuaire, Twitter, and the Google+ social network.

source: technology.inquirer.net

Google founder hopes Alphabet spells innovation

SAN FRANCISCO — Google founder Larry Page is hoping his newly created company, Alphabet, becomes synonymous with innovation.

In a Monday night appearance, Page described Alphabet as a way to give engineers and scientists the independence they need to develop breakthrough products that have little or nothing to do with Google’s Internet search and advertising business.

Along the way, Page hopes Alphabet will take the drudgery and bureaucracy out of work.

“Companies have pretty bad reputations,” Page told a dinner audience gathered in San Francisco for a forum presented by Fortune magazine. “It’s not like a lot of people wake up in the morning and say, ‘I want to go work for a company.’ They do it because they have to.”

Monday’s 20-minute appearance marked Page’s first public remarks since he announced in August that Alphabet would become Google’s holding company, as well as the parent of riskier ventures involved in self-driving cars, Internet-beaming balloons, Internet-connected appliances and medical research.

Page now oversees the hodgepodge of companies as Alphabet’s CEO. He turned over the Google CEO job to his top lieutenant, Sundar Pichai. Alphabet supplanted Google as a public traded stock in early October.

The idea for Alphabet’s name came from Google’s other founder, Sergey Brin, according to Page. Several other names were considered, Page said, but he declined to disclose them in case they are used for other subsidiaries. The new holding company will begin reporting Google’s financial results separately from its other subsidiaries, known as “other bets,” in January with the release of its fourth-quarter results.

Alphabet’s rudimentary name was chosen, Page said, because it isn’t supposed to overshadow Google or any of the other brands in its portfolio. “I didn’t want it to be too catchy,” Page said. “It’s really for employees, more than the customers.”

If there is a role model for Alphabet, Page said it would probably be Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company that billionaire Warren Buffet has built through acquisitions and investments in a wide variety of industries.

Alphabet could become like a Berkshire Hathaway, with a “technology, science and engineering bent,” Page said. Acquisitions will be part of Alphabet’s plan to expand, although Page indicated the company will probably focus on startups with interesting ideas and relatively few employees.

There are few other companies besides Berkshire Hathaway that Page wants to mimic. “I wish I could look at someone else and say, ‘I wish we were doing that,'” he said. TVJ

source: technology.inquirer.net

Google refines logo as it prepares to join Alphabet

SAN FRANCISCO — Google is refining its famous logo as it prepares to become a part of a new holding company called Alphabet.

The revised design unveiled Tuesday features the same mix of blue, red, yellow and green that Google has been using throughout its nearly 17-year history, though the hues are slightly different shades.

Google also invented a new typeface called “Product Sans” that is meant to resemble the simple printing in a grade-school book. It will replace a serif typeface that Google has been using in its logo for more than 16 years. The “e” in the company’s name will remain slightly tilted to reflect Google’s sometimes off-kilter thinking.

Although this will be the sixth time that Google has changed its logo since Larry Page and Sergey Brin formed the company, this marks the most noticeable redesign since it dropped an exclamation point that appeared after its name until May 1999.

“I am sure this is going to upset a lot of people because everyone freaks out when a company like this makes a shift like this,” said Wally Krantz, executive creative director at brand consultants Landor. Krantz, though, applauded the change because he believes it gives the company a “fresh” look.

Google is donning the different look as it embarks on a new era.

The Mountain View, California, company is pouring so much money into so many far-flung projects that have little or no connection to its main business of online search and advertising that it’s getting ready to place everything under the Alphabet umbrella.

Under this setup, Google will retain search, YouTube and most of the biggest divisions while smaller operations such as Nest home appliances, life sciences, drone deliveries and venture capital investments will operate as individual companies. All will be overseen by Alphabet, whose CEO will be the Google co-founder Page.

Alphabet hasn’t revealed what its logo will be yet, but the holding company isn’t expected to be officially operating for a few more months.

Google believes its new logo will provide a more versatile identity suited “for a world of seamless computing across an endless number of devices,” the company said in a Tuesday blog post.

The overhaul also will change the appearance of the letter “g” that Google uses as its shorthand logo on the smaller screens of smartphones and other mobile devices.

The “g” will now be capitalized and displayed in color instead of being kept lowercase and white.

A swirl of dots in Google’s colors will also appear when a spoken command for information is being processed or one of the company’s other services is performing a task.

source: technology.inquirer.net