Tag: Google

Google Hangouts has an update rolling out for Android that is probably best described as a house cleaning release.  The update takes the messaging app to version 16 and cleans up contact lists and improves search within the app.  Contact lists in this update are more streamlined with the Contacts option in the menu now gone.  It has been removed from this part of the app as it was redundant to the Floating Action Button in your chat lists.  You can use that FAB to add a chat with any contact(s) so they are effectively listed there for you.

Search within Hangouts has also been improved around contacts.  Now when you tap the FAB to start a new conversation, when you start to type in the name of a contact, you will see four different lists:  Frequent, On Hangouts, Your Groups and Not on Hangouts.  The idea here is to quickly identify what communication paths are open for a contact so you can chose the best one for them.  For those who are not on Hangouts, you will see an “Invite” link by their name.

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.

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.

Google Translate has an update rolling out for Android that brings instant translation to and from Japanese to English.  Now you can point your phone’s camera to a book, sign or other text in English and it will instantly translate it to Japanese on your phone or vise versa.  It brings the total number of instant translation languages to 30 in the app of the 103 languages available.

Instant translations come into play best when you are in a country with a supported language and need help with signs as you navigate around a city.  Depending on the country, like Japan where the dialect is vastly different than English, that can be challenging which is where Google Translate really shines.

Google+ has a new feature rolling out that allows you to quickly see how posts you have made are being received.  Called Your Influence, it is found on your Google+ profile next to the About button.  There you will find an overflow menu (the three vertical dots) which you can tap and then see your stats.  The stats can be viewed for the last 7 days or the last 30 days and give you a lot of information about how many new followers you have, how many new collection followers you have for your collections and the influence of your posts.

The feature is rolling out now so it make take a few more hours for everyone to see it.

Slow but surely, Google Home is getting smarter.  Today the Home team announced that support for smart home devices from Belkin and Honeywell could now be controlled by the smart speaker-Google Assistant infused device.  Belkin Wemo and Honeywell both make a wide range of smart home accessories that are Wi-Fi enabled such as thermostats, light switches, electrical plugs and webcams.  Now you can add these to you Google Home in the Home Control section of the app and as long as everything is on the same network, you can set it up to be controlled by Google Home.

When Home was launched last year, Google was clear that more partners would be coming to the device and more integrations would be coming.  So far we’ve seen Netflix added from an app perspective as well as a huge number of bots to get information from various resources.  With the addition of Belkin and Honeywell, from a smart home perspective, you are no longer just tied to Nest.