Google Ventures is the leading investor in a $15 million round of funding for the Farmers Business Network, a company that is using big data to show farms large and small how to make the most of their business.
Farmers Business Network is the brainchild of Charles Baron, a former program lead of energy innovation and geothermal projects at Google. For $500 a year farmers can contribute to and access FBN’s giant store of farming data that tells them which products and methods deliver the highest yields for a specific crop in a given location.
Bucharest-based Automobile Club of Romania has come up with a solution to a seemingly impossible problem: how to make driving theory practice more interesting. The answer, it seems, is to create questionnaires based on real Google Street View situations. Street View Test enables learner drivers to hone their traffic law knowledge using the streets they will eventually be driving on. Drivers can even add their own tips — identifying unruly traffic situations they have spotted on the Google Street View — for the organization to create questions from.
Google’s top secret Google X research lab is working on a handful of projects to build better batteries for mobile devices, reports the Wall Street Journal.
It’s not just about making sure our cell phones last a little longer, though that’s a nice side-effect too. Really, what’s going on is that the new wave of wearable devices, flying drones, electric cars, and what-have-you are going to have higher and more specific power needs than what you get with our current lithium-ion (like in phones) and alkaline batteries (like in Wii controllers).
Nuevo contraataque de Google en el mercado de los ordenadores. Esta vez con una aproximación diferente a la que el gigante de las búsquedas tiene acostumbrado al mercado, sus portátiles Chromebook. La compañía ha anunciado que el próximo verano lanzará un pequeño dispositivo, llamado Chromebit, similar a un stick o memoria USB, que convierte cualquier televisores o pantalla con entrada HDMI en un ordenador con Chrome OS, su sistema operativo basado en la web. Y ello por menos de 100 dólares (unos 93 euros).
Google today released a new sample app called Universal Music Player that works on smartphones, tablets, Android Auto, Android Wear, and Google Cast devices. The word “sample” is key here: This is a reference design for developers so they can learn how to implement a service that works across multiple form factors.
That’s exactly why this audio media app isn’t being released on Google Play. It’s available on GitHub so developers can grab the source code and adapt their own app accordingly.
From answering heath-related questions in its search results to a fitness data platform for developers, Google is becoming increasingly ingrained in the fabric of our daily health-and-wellbeing habits. But behind the scenes, the Internet giant is also working to expedite the discovery of drugs that could prove vital to finding cures for many human ills.
Google-owned Nest is branching out beyond monthly energy usage reports. Now it will send monthly emails tracking energy, home temperature, and carbon monoxide presence to Nest Protect smoke alarm owners.
After two years of popping up at high-profile events sporting Google Glass, the gadget that transforms eyeglasses into spy-movie worthy technology, Google co-founder Sergey Brin sauntered bare-faced into a Silicon Valley red-carpet event on Sunday.
He'd left his pair in the car, Brin told a reporter. The Googler, who heads up the top-secret lab which developed Glass, has hardly given up on the product -- he recently wore his pair to the beach.
Google today announced it has completed the first build of its self-driving vehicle prototype. This is the first fully functional self-driving car from the company.
It’s one thing to modify an existing car to give it self-driving capabilities. It’s another thing to build a self-driving car from the ground up.
The first fully functional prototype can be seen in the image above. For the sake of comparison, here is the mockup unveiled in May:
