Google announces Google Station to offer free Wi-Fi services everywhere

Google wants every public place on the planet to have fast Wi-Fi service.

Less than one year after Google began connecting railway stations in India with free Wi-Fi service, the company introduced a similar program to bring fast Wi-Fi service across the world. The company plans to bring fast Wi-Fi service to cafes, malls and all other places with a new initiative it calls Google Station.

At company's second installment of Google for India event in New Delhi today, Caesar Sengupta, VP of Google’s Next Billion Plan said the company is opening the platform to anyone and everyone who has a good internet connection.

The inspiration for Google Station came from the success of Google's partnership with Indian Railways to provide free Wi-Fi services at railway stations in India. Currently, Google claims, the service is live in 52 stations and over 3.5 million users use it every month. Google also reckons that 15,000 Indians access the internet for the first time using the free Wi-Fi service every day.

On its website, the company urges people to connect with the company, and discuss how they can help bring internet to more people. It also has plans to offer monetary benefits to its partners, Sengupta added.

"We'll be partnering with large venues and organizations, network operators, fiber providers, system integrators and infrastructure companies," the company describes on its website.

Courtesy : Techgig

Google acquires Urban Engines to bring its location-based analytics to Google Maps

Google has acquired Urban Engines, a provider of location-based analytics for urban planning. The team will be joining the Google Maps team in a bid to “help organizations better understand how the world moves.” Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Founded in 2014, Urban Engines leverages big data and spatial analytics to help local governments and businesses assess urban mobility and improve transportation offerings in the surrounding area. The company was created by Shiva Shivakumar, Balaji Prabhakar, Giao Nguyen, and Deepak Merugu. The move to Google is a homecoming for Shivakumar and Nguyen, who previously served as the company’s vice president of engineering and principal engineer, respectively.

After two years of analyzing “billions of trips” and “improving the lives of millions of commuters,” Urban Engine said it’s time to prepare the next phase of its journey.

In a blog post, Urban Engines explains that since its story began — during a traffic jam — it has been working to make the world as easy to navigate “as our web world.” It has leveraged mobile technology, GPS and beacon sensors, and other signals to better understand how people and objects move around the world. The company has ambitions to create an urban OS, which is described as intelligent software layered on top of our real world.

In 2014, Urban Engines raised an undisclosed amount of funding from notable investors, including Andreessen Horowitz; SV Angel; GV; Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt; and Ram Shriram, Google’s first investor.

The company has done work for customers in the Americas, Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, including partnering with mayoral offices and ministries within “smart cities” to help them better understand their constituents’ mobility challenges.

Courtesy : VentureBeat

Google launches final release version of Angular 2.0

After Google launched the first version of its Angular web application framework in 2010, it quickly became one of the hottest web technologies. Since then, the web has changed, though, and when Google announced Angular 2 in 2014, it created quite a stir in the web development community because this new version wasn’t just an update, but instead a complete rewrite that wasn’t compatible with the older version. Today, after numerous preview and beta releases, the company is officially launching the final release version of Angular 2.0.

“Angular 1 first solved the problem of how to develop for an emerging web,” the company writes in today’s announcement. “Six years later, the challenges faced by today’s application developers, and the sophistication of the devices that applications must support, have both changed immensely.”

Application developers today, however, also have a far wider choice of JavaScript frameworks. Facebook’s React framework especially has a lot of momentum behind it, though, to be fair, the two projects have slightly different styles (Angular is a far more opinionated framework, for example) and strengths (React Native makes it easy to build native apps, for example). But given that Google doesn’t give developers who built applications with React 1.x an easy upgrade path, many of them are now looking at which technology to use next.

Angular 2.0 introduces a number of new features, including better support for modern browsers and mobile development. The team also moved a lot of the core functionality into modules that now make it easier to use third-party libraries in addition to the built-in ones. The team now also recommends that developers use TypeScript to write their apps. TypeScript is a Microsoft-developed superset of JavaScript that adds features like static typing and class-based object-oriented programming.


Looking ahead, the Angular team plans to provide developers with more guides and examples to help them learn Angular 2.0 faster. In addition, the team plans to put more work into animations for Angular 2.0 and move its WebWorker support out of its experimental branch. Angular Universal, a project that lets you render your app server-side so first-time users will quickly see a server-rendered version of your site, for example, will also soon get support for more languages.

Going forward, the team will also move to releasing Angular updates through three channels (major, minor and patch). Major versions are those that introduce incompatible API changes. Minor versions signal the addition of backwards-compatible functionality and the version numbers for the patch version ticks up as backwards-compatible bugs are fixed.

Courtesy : Techgig

Apigee officially acquired by Google

Apigee has revealed that it has entered into a definitive agreement to be acquired by Google after last week's news that the search company was planning to acquire it for its cloud based software.

Google will purchase the company for $17.40 per share in cash with the total value of the deal amounting to $625 million. The acquisition will be subject to Apigee stockholder and regulatory approval. Apigee and Google expect the deal to come to a close by the end of 2016.

Diane Greene, SVP of Google's cloud business was eager to welcome Apigee and its employees, saying: “We’re excited about adding Apigee to Google, companies are moving beyond the traditional ways of communicating like phone calls and visits and instead are communicating programmatically through APIs.”

“APIs allow the company’s backend services to talk to the mobile and web-based apps used by their customers and partners. Instead of the doctor phoning a prescription into the pharmacy, they can use an app that talks to the pharmacy through an API. Apigee easily enables this by providing a comprehensive API platform that supports secure, stable, multi-language, dev, test, publish and analytics capabilities.”

Chet Kapoor, Apigee's CEO shared his enthusiasm regarding what the company will be able to accomplish with Google's vast resources: “We've entered a new era of cloud computing, where enterprises are increasingly running business-critical applications in the cloud – and across multiple clouds. Google is the open cloud provider committed to delivering new software for not only hybrid-cloud environments, but also for the multi-cloud world."

“With their history of innovation in web and mobile technologies, we believe Google is the partner for companies embarking on digital transformation. We look forward to being able to accelerate our mission to connect the world through APIs as part of the Google team.”  

Courtesy : ITProportal.com

Google plans to develop website 'Bharat Saves'; to offer information on financial planning

Google wants to help you save more and invest better.

The US-headquartered technology company with a large India presence is planning to develop a website, Bharat Saves, which will offer information on financial planning.

Google wants to align its Bharat Saves website to the government's financial inclusion scheme, Jan Dhan Yojana, which has since its 2014 launch seen 24 crore new bank accounts being opened and attracted deposits ofRs 41,000 crore.

A senior finance ministry official, speaking off record, told ET that Google is in talks with the government and that the company's proposal is being "examined".
He said the digital platform "may provide a range of financial literacy tools and information on financial products".

A Google spokesperson told ET: "In line with the Prime Minister's vision to create greater financial inclusion-....various BFSI organisations and industry associations are coming together to launch a digital platform".

The spokesperson also said a financial literacy awareness campaign may be part of the plan. Bharat Saves will be an app and website, both of which are being designed by Google.

In the first leg, users have to log into either of the platforms and complete financial literacy modules.

They will need to take a financial literacy test, the certifications for which will be given by the Indian government, Google and an industry organization.

Target Consumers for Google's Offering

These will open up a second section of the app/website, where users will be able to see, compare and purchase banking and insurance products. Eventually, more financial product categories will be added and the platform will be linked to PM's Jan Dhan Yojana.
The target consumers for this platform will be homemakers, small business owners, the newly employed, retired persons and farmers.

Apple pay

Google's proposal to the government comes at a time another American technology behemoth, Apple, has held talks with the government on making Apple Pay, a mobile payment and digital wallet service, a part of financial inclusion programmes.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has met several technology company CEOs and deeper participation in the government's Digital India programme has been on the agenda in these meetings.
"There were some discussions on these issues when the PM met CEOs of top tech giants at the Digital India forum in San Jose, California during his visit to the US," an official familiar with the issue said.
India's savings rate has fallen recently - IMF data shows a fall from 36 per cent of GDP to 31 per cent GDP between 2007-08 and now. Household savings have also fallen, with other data showing households save less than a quarter of their disposable income, down from over 30 per cent around four years back.
While stagnant income in real terms/high inflation for many social classes has been identified as a recent factor for drop in the savings rate, economists have long argued that lack of access to modern financial instruments is also a structural contributory factor.

Courtesy : Techgig

Google: We're Working On The Penguin Launch Announcement

We must be close if Google is actively working on their announcement for when Penguin 4.0 goes live.

John Mueller of Google said this at the 44:30 mark into yesterday's hangout on YouTube Live. He said "we are working on an announcement for that there, so like when it's ready we will let you know."

That means, Google is already working with press and whomever to make sure they get the Penguin announcement clear and right. John then answered if the Penguin announcement will come before or after it goes live and John said "I don't know about before but we will try to get the the timing so that we don't confuse everyone."

So clearly, Google is taking this Penguin release seriously and if they are working on the announcement, it has to be coming fairly soon?

As you know, some thought the weekend update was related to Penguin, it was not. It is now over a year and 10 months, almost two years since Penguin 3.0 launched in October 2014.

Courtesy: Seroundtable.com

What is Google Penguin??

The 10 biggest European tech stories

Tech.eu tracked 14 technology M&A transactions and 46 funding deals (totalling €258 million) in Europe, Turkey and Israel.

Like every week, we listed every single one of them in our free weekly newsletter, along with interesting news regarding fledgling European startups, tech investors old and new, a number of good reads published elsewhere, government and policy news, as well as an overview of interesting lists, facts and figures from a wide variety of sources.

You can subscribe to our newsletter below to receive all this information in your inbox every Friday afternoon for free, but here’s an overview of the 10 biggest European tech news items for this week:

1) Randstad, an Amsterdam-based human resources and recruitment specialist, is acquiring job hunting portal Monster for $429 million in cash.

2) Uber has made a small, direct investment in four European tech startups.

3) Russia’s national regulator fined Google $6.75 million for violating antitrust rules on tablets and mobile phones, after reviewing a complaint filed by local search engine Yandex last year.

4) Dutch data visualisation startup Silk has been acquired by Peter Thiel’s Palantir for an undisclosed amount, will shut down its service.

5) American-Israeli open-source video platform Kaltura has raised $50 million from Goldman Sachs.

6) Apple’s planned €850 million data center in Ireland has been approved.

7) British mobile banking startup Mondo has been granted a UK banking licence ‘with restrictions’ by regulators.

8) Airbnb paid less than €70,000 in taxes in France in 2015, according to reports in French media, as authorities in Barcelona have stepped up a crackdown on homes illegally rented out to tourists on the website.

9) Online retailer Amazon plans to create 500 new jobs when it opens another distribution center in northern England next year.

10) Telecoms companies will face new EU rules on how they can access Internet networks under a change to European law that could stoke tensions between large, former monopolies and smaller operators.

This post first appeared on Tech.eu