ClintonFitch.com

Alphabet, the parent company of Google, posted earnings of $26 billion in the 4th quarter of 2016.  That is an increase of 22% over the same period in 2015.  Those earning yielded a profit of $5.3 billion for the company which was in increase of $300 million from the previous quarter.  As with previous quarterly reports, the banner brand for Alphabet is Google.  It lead the way as far as earnings go at $25.8 billion that yielded profits of $7.8 billion for the division.

Adverts continue to be the main revenue stream for the company with $22.4 billion earned from them in Q4 2016.  But non-advert revenue also increased to just over $3.4 billion.  Google did not break down exactly where this increase came from but undoubtedly the hardware division, who is behind the Google Pixel.

Google Maps has rolled out a new feature that gives you an idea of how difficult parking will be once you get to your destination.  The new feature is a behind-the-scenes update so if you have the latest build of the Maps apps installed, the new feature will appear in the metro areas in which it is enabled.

Factoring in time for parking can make or break a night out, let alone making it to that big meeting on time. So in 25 metro areas throughout the U.S., we’ve introduced a new parking difficulty icon in Google Maps for Android that’ll give you a heads up on what kind of parking crunch to prepare for when you’re on the go.

This should make sure that you are on time to that dinner reservation or meeting as it builds in some time for you to go park your vehicle.

The Chrome team has started rolling out a new major build of the browser for Windows, Mac and Linux.  Chrome build 56.0.2924.76 has a long list of security fixes and enhancements but also has an impressive list of new features along with it.  In all there are 21 specific issues addressed in the release notes, 7 of which were considered high priority.  As is the usual case, Google hasn’t released all the details of what was addressed.  They will do that after a majority of users have upgraded to the new build.

In this build, full HTML5 is supported which means the end of Adobe Flash plug-in for everyone.  You should get a prompt when you first open up the browser about Flash and the idea here is to make it a better browsing experience for everyone.  And safer.

You may want to put your shocked face on because it looks like Facebook is going to start putting ads in Facebook Messenger.

That was sarcasm folks.

The company announced today that they are going to begin testing ads in Messenger in Thailand and Australia with businesses having the option to have their products advertized below your recent conversations in the app.  It is a small start and really, it makes a lot of sense for Facebook to do this, like it or not.  Facebook Messenger has over a billion users per month which makes it an ideal platform to surface ads.