Google Acquires Motorola Mobility

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Google Closes Acquisition of Motorola Mobility

Google Is Reporting: We’ve Acquired Motorola Mobility

The phones in our pockets have become supercomputers that are changing the way we live. It’s now possible to do things we used to think were magic, or only possible on Star Trek-like get directions right from where we are standing; watch a video on YouTube; or take a picture and share the moment instantly with friends.

It’s why I’m excited to announce today that our Motorola Mobility deal has closed. Motorola is a great American tech company that has driven the mobile revolution, with a track record of over 80 years of innovation, including the creation of the first cell phone. We all remember Motorola’s StarTAC, which at the time seemed tiny and showed the real potential of these devices. And as a company who made a big, early bet on Android, Motorola has become an incredibly valuable partner to Google.

Sanjay Jha, who was responsible for building the company and placing that big bet on Android, has stepped down as CEO. I would like to thank him for his efforts and am tremendously pleased that he will be working to ensure a smooth transition as long-time Googler Dennis Woodside takes over as CEO of Motorola Mobility.

I’ve known Dennis for nearly a decade, and he’s been phenomenal at building teams and delivering on some of Google’s biggest bets. One of his first jobs at Google was to put on his backpack and build our businesses across the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe and Russia. More recently he helped increase our revenue in the U.S. from $10.8 billion to $17.5 billion in under three years as President of the Americas region. Dennis has always been a committed partner to our customers and I know he will be an outstanding leader of Motorola. As an Ironman triathlete, he’s got plenty of energy for the journey ahead - and he’s already off to great start with some very strong new hires for the Motorola team.

It’s a well known fact that people tend to overestimate the impact technology will have in the short term, but underestimate its significance in the longer term. Many users coming online today may never use a desktop machine, and the impact of that transition will be profound - as will the ability to just tap and pay with your phone. That’s why it’s a great time to be in the mobile business, and why I’m confident Dennis and the team at Motorola will be creating the next generation of mobile devices that will improve lives for years to come. Posted by Larry Page, CEO

Google Acquires Motorola Mobility

We’ve Acquired Motorola Mobility

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Introducing Google Knowledge Graph

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Google Boosts Search Intelligence With Knowledge Graph

Google Is Reporting

Search is a lot about discovery - the basic human need to learn and broaden your horizons. But searching still requires a lot of hard work by you, the user. So today I’m really excited to launch the Knowledge Graph, which will help you discover new information quickly and easily.

Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine the words [taj mahal] have been just that - two words.

But we all know that [taj mahal] has a much richer meaning. You might think of one of the world’s most beautiful monuments, or a Grammy Award-winning musician, or possibly even a casino in Atlantic City, NJ. Or, depending on when you last ate, the nearest Indian restaurant. It’s why we’ve been working on an intelligent model - in geek-speak, a “graph” - that understands real-world entities and their relationships to one another: things, not strings.

The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about - landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more - and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.

Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. It’s also augmented at a much larger scale - because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.

The Knowledge Graph enhances Google Search in three main ways to start:
1. Find the right thing
2. Get the best summary
3. Go deeper and broader

We hope this added intelligence will give you a more complete picture of your interest, provide smarter search results, and pique your curiosity on new topics. We’re proud of our first baby step - the Knowledge Graph - which will enable us to make search more intelligent, moving us closer to the "Star Trek computer" that I've always dreamt of building. Enjoy your lifelong journey of discovery, made easier by Google Search, so you can spend less time searching and more time doing what you love. Posted by Amit Singhal, SVP, Engineering

Introducing the Knowledge Graph Get an under the hood look at the next frontier in Search, from the team at Google behind the technology. The Knowledge Graph is a huge collection of the people, places and things in the world and how they're connected to one another. With this technology, Google can get you the best possible answers and help jump start your discovery.

Introducing the Knowledge Graph: things, not strings

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Google Approved to Operate Self-Driving Cars in Nevada

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(CNN) -- If you want to salute, race or flirt with other drivers in Nevada, you could soon be out of luck with some cars. That's because on Monday, Nevada became the first to approve a license for "autonomous vehicles" - in other words, cars that cruise, twist and turn without the need for a driver - on its roads.

(ABC) -- Nevada is putting the pedal to the metal on those autonomous automobiles. It was just two months ago that the state approved and set regulations that would allow self-driving vehicles on the state’s roadways. And today it announced that it has approved Google for the first testing license under the new rules.

Google gets license to operate driverless cars in Nevada - CNN.com

Google Self-Driving Car License Approved in Nevada - ABC News

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Get Stuff Done in the Cloud: Go Google

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Google Cloud

Google is reporting:

You probably hear terms like “the cloud” or “cloud computing” being used a lot these days. While the idea of the cloud may seem abstract, many things you already do on your computer and smartphone today, such as email, photo sharing and video streaming, are made possible by the cloud.

At the heart of it, Google is about cloud computing - helping people live online and get things done in the cloud. Whether you need to add “milk” to a shared shopping list from the train, collaborate with your teammate back in the office to finish your presentation from a hotel lobby, or chat face-to-face with your mom from halfway around the world, we believe that getting stuff done in the cloud is a better way. We like to call it “going Google.”

We’ve built cloud-based tools like Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Docs to help you connect and collaborate online with others more quickly and easily, without having to deal with the hassles and frustrations of installing and managing traditional software. Last week’s launch of Google Drive is the next step: Google Drive brings together many Google services—documents, spreadsheets, images and more—all in one place so you can easily create, collaborate, and share in real-time. Files are saved automatically, and friends, teammates, roommates, families and co-workers can do things together—even when they’re not. If you haven’t already tried it, Google Drive is a great place to start going Google.

Today, hundreds of millions of people, including 16 million students and teachers at 66 of the top 100 U.S. universities, employees at more than 4 million businesses worldwide including Burberry, Costco and National Geographic (and maybe even your 13-year-old daughter and her entire soccer team) have all already gone Google.

If you’re going Google to build a company, great. If you write your grand opus poem, even better. If you have to turn a project around from different time zones overnight, awesome. And if you video-chat with grandma while you do—well, that’s just showing off. So go on. See what it’s like to get stuff done and go Google.

Posted by Venkat Panchapakesan, VP Engineering

Get stuff done in the cloud. Go Google.

Google Drive

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