At Google’s I/O Developer Conference from May 17-19, CEO Sundar Pichai announced a new technology called “Google Lens” that utilizes computer vision and artificial intelligence technologies that enables your smartphone to understand what you’re looking at and help act based on that information.

“So for example if you run into something and you want to know what it is—say a flower—you can invoke Google Lens from your assistant, point your phone at it and we can tell you what flower it is,” said Sundar Pichai, Google CEO at the conference. “Or, if you’ve ever been at a friend’s place and you’ve crawled under a desk just to get the username and password from a Wi-Fi router, you can point your phone at it and we can automatically do the hard work for you.”

He added, “Or, if you’re walking in a street downtown and you see a set of restaurants across you, you can point your phone, because we know where you are, and we have our Knowledge Graph, and we know what you’re looking at, we can give you the right information in a meaningful way.”

Pichai noted that Google was built because they “started understanding text and web pages, so the fact that computers can understand images and video has profound implications for our core mission.”

Google Lens will first ship in Google Assistant and Photos, and will come to other products in the future.

At Google’s Marketing Next conference, the company is announcing a new beta for Google Attribution, a free tool for examining the role that different marketing strategies play in customer purchasing decisions.

Regardless of device or marketing channel, Google wants Attribution to be a home for evaluating marketing campaigns. By creating a tight loop between strategy, ad spend and feedback, Google aims to make the tool attractive to marketers that feel last-click models don’t sufficiently explain customer behavior.

A panacea for attribution is not a new construct in the world of marketing. Companies like Adobe and startups like BrightFunnel and Bizible have been developing tools for years that allow marketers to break the old last-click paradigm.

Google’s Jamboard is not a kitchen app for curating PB&J recipes – it’s a 55-inch digital whiteboard, with pen and touch input, companion iOS and Android apps, an Nvidia Jetson TX1 processor on board and 4K resolution. The behemoth is an enterprise-focused collaboration tool

A week ago, Microsoft held its Build developer conference in its backyard in Seattle. This week, Google did the same in an amphitheater right next to its Mountain View campus. While Microsoft’s event felt like it embodied the resurgence of the company under the leadership of Satya Nadella, Google I/O — and especially its various, somewhat scattershot keynotes — fell flat this year.

The two companies have long been rivals, of course, but now — maybe more than ever — they are on a collision course that has them compete in cloud computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence, productivity applications and virtual and augmented reality.

And while Google mostly celebrated itself during its main I/O keynote, Nadella spent a good chunk of time during his segment on celebrating and empowering developers in a way that felt very genuine.

Having spent a few days at both events, I couldn’t help coming home thinking that it may be Microsoft that has the more complete vision for this AI-first world we’ll soon live in — and if Google has it, it didn’t do a good job articulating it at I/O this year.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted during his keynote segment that the company is moving from being a mobile first company to an AI first one. Microsoft is essentially on the same path, even as its CEO Satya Nadella phrased it differently. Neither company really mentioned the other during its keynote events, but the parallels here are pretty clear.

The two marquee products both companies used to show off their AI prowess were surprisingly similar. For Microsoft, that was Story Remix, a very nifty app that automatically makes interesting home videos our of your photos and videos. For Google, it was Google Photos, which is using its machine learning tech to help you share your best photos more easily. Remix is a far more fun and interesting product

Google Lens, which can identify useful information in images, looks like it could be really useful
Google also still offers Google Goggles, an app that allowed you to identify objects around you for a few years now. I think Google forgot that even existed, as it’s sometimes prone to do.

At the core of the two companies’ AI efforts for consumers are Microsoft Cortana and the Google Assistant. This is one area where Google remains clearly ahead of Microsoft, simply because it offers more hardware surfaces for accessing it and because it knows more about the user (and the rest of the world). Cortana works well enough, but because it mostly lives on the desktop and isn’t really connected to the rest of your devices, using it never comes natural.

In the virtual personal assistant arena, Google actually had some interesting announcements (though things like making calls on Google Home fell a bit flat, too, simply because Amazon announced this same feature for its Echo speakers a few days earlier).

With the Microsoft Graph, it’s worth mentioning, Microsoft is now building a fabric that will tie all of your devices and applications together. Whether that will work as planned remains to be seen, but it’s a bold project that could have wide-reaching consequences for how you use Microsoft’s tools, even on Android, in the future.

Both Microsoft and Google used their events to announce relatively evolutionary updates to their flagship operating systems. Google, of course, had already pre-announced Android O and Microsoft had already pre-announced that it’ll now offer two Windows 10 releases a year, so the fact that we’ll get a new update in the fall really wasn’t a surprise.

Google this week launched a set of security services designed to bring improved protection and visibility for Android users.

Dubbed Google Play Protect, the new product is built into all devices with Google Play and should provide “comprehensive security services for Android,” the Internet giant says.

“Whether you’re checking email for work, playing Pokémon Go with your kids or watching your favorite movie, confidence in the security of your device and data is important,” Edward Cunningham, Product Manager, Android Security, notes.

“We know you want to be confident that your Android devices are safe and secure, which is why we are doubling down on our commitment to security,” he continues.

There are 2 billion active Android devices globally and Google performs more than 50 billion application scans every day to keep them safe.

Keeping you safe with Google Play Protect
https://blog.google/products/android/google-play-protect/

We know you want to be confident that your Android devices are safe and secure, which is why we are doubling down on our commitment to security. Today we introduced Google Play Protect—Google’s comprehensive security services for Android, providing powerful new protections and greater visibility into your device security. Play Protect is built into every device with Google Play, is always updating, and automatically takes action to keep your data and device safe, so you don’t have to lift a finger.

How Google’s band of hardware pirates has re-invented itself after its legendary leader jumped ship

Steve Kovach 16 May 2017 10:08 PM

Regina Dugan (left) and Google’s Rick Osterloh
Samantha Lee/Business Insider; Facebook; Ramin Talaie/Getty Images

Almost three years ago, one of Google’s most celebrated executives took the stage at the company’s big developer conference and declared that the future was being built in a secretive hardware group she led.

“You’re going to get a glimpse of a small band of pirates trying to do epic shit,” she said, referencing nearly a dozen ambitious technology products under development and touting the team’s quick pace of execution.

Today Regina Dugan, the Google executive, is gone, and the remaining members of the crew she had assembled have made limited progress turning the bold vision into reality.

Google’s Advanced Technologies and Products group, or ATAP, still works in its own secure building on the outskirts of the Google campus, but the mission, culture, and spirit are much different than they once were, current and former members of the group told Business Insider.

“We’re not being pirates anymore,” said one person involved with ATAP. “We’re lowering the flag.”

Instead of dreaming up far-fetched research and development projects, the ATAP group now functions more like a product division tasked with shipping market-ready goods. The team of engineers and software developers now works more closely with sales and marketing employees in Google’s consumer hardware division.

As expected, the opening keynote of Google’s I/O 2017 developer conference was a doozy. For two and a half hours, CEO Sundar Pichai and a handful of execs rattled off a staggering list of futuristic features and products: A camera that understands what it sees! AI tools a high-schooler can use to help detect cancer! An omniscient, omnipresent virtual assistant! Independent, incredible, immersive virtual reality! To watch the address was to feel like the future had just arrived, all at once, right before your eyes.

Then you go down the list of actual new things, the stuff you can try right now. An Assistant app for iPhone, a way of sending simple email replies without typing them, Google for Jobs. And you realize I/O felt less like a Jobsian product reveal and more like a TED talk: good ideas, educated guesses, and impressive research, but precious little practical application. The same could be said for last year’s event, too. Remember that awesome Google Home launch video? You’re still waiting for many of the things it promised. It was a vision for a product, not a product.

Google’s not alone. In many ways, the entire tech world finds itself in limbo. The internet, smartphones, and Facebook conquered the world and are now ubiquitous. Meanwhile, the next wave of technology lingers just around the corner: Self-driving cars ruling the road, a world filtered through augmented-reality glasses, and artificial intelligence in every person, place, and thing. All of that and more is definitely coming. Someday. And every day it doesn’t, it feels late.

The vast majority of Android developers use Google’s own Android Studio integrated development environment (IDE). Google offered a first look at what Android Studio 3.0 will look like. Most of these upcoming features are now available in the Android Studio early release channel.

Google’s Perfect Future Will Always Be Just Around The Corner
https://www.wired.com/2017/05/googles-perfect-future-will-always-just-around-corner/