Alphabet

Waymo, the Alphabet business working on autonomous cars, has released its first safety report, a recap of 3.5m miles of on-road activity. Intended to reassure potential passengers - and wary regulators - that self-driving vehicles are "safer by design," the report covers everything from incidents through to backup systems. It also digs into what sort of interactions with a driverless vehicle passengers might expect.

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Google has pledged a billion dollars in nonprofit grants over the next five years, part of a push to help reskill workforces around the world. The news, announced in Pittsburgh, PA today, sees Google roll out three initiatives as it tackles evolving job roles - prompted, in no small part, by its own developments and products.

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This is what Project Loon was made for. Well, perhaps not exactly the dire situation facing Puerto Rico at the moment. But the balloon-powered Internet delivery dream was meant to bring connectivity to places where traditional lines can't reach. And that is more or less what the hurricane-battered Caribbean US territory is going through after Maria caused massive destruction, affecting both power and Internet services. Thankfully, the FCC just gave Alphabet's X an experimental license to help Puerto Rico repair its network grid.

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Look out Uber. Sources claim Alphabet is currently in talks about making a major investment in ridesharing company Lyft, something that will be done through either Google or CapitalG. The news comes amidst Waymo's legal spat with Uber, something that resulted in a deal between Waymo and Lyft earlier this year. Sources claim Alphabet and Lyft haven't finalized a deal at this time.

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Yes, that sounds strange ain’t it? But consider that the first and last thermostat to come from what was known back then as Nest Labs was the original Nest Learning Thermostat in 2011. Since then, the company has come a long way, released a smoke detector and security cameras, and as was acquired by Google and then under Alphabet in the great reshuffling. Now the company is going back to its roots with the Nest Thermostat E, bringing the lessons of the past 6 years to even more people and more houses.

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai has joined the Alphabet Board of Directors, expanding the executive's responsibility. Pichai has been at the helm of Google since August 2015, when it was scythed off from the rest of the company's businesses and became one of several under the Alphabet umbrella brand. Alphabet announced its Q2 2017 financial results today.

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Google's ill-fated wearable, Glass, has been reborn for factory drones as Glass Enterprise Edition, now part of Alphabet's developmental X division. The new version of the headset has already been used in trials with a number of business customers, the team announced today, with a revamped version of the hardware and a new focus on making manufacturing, project management, and other enterprise tasks more productive. It's been enough to catch the attention of big names like DHL, GE, Boeing, and Volkswagen.

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Waymo has dropped all but one of the patent infringement claims it's challenging Uber over in court, as the two companies fight over self-driving car tech. The Alphabet-owned company had accused Uber of infringing on four different patents related to autonomous driving, filing a lawsuit back in February. According to Waymo, its former employee Anthony Levandowski had stolen a cache of technical documents about the company's developments and taken them to set up Otto, a self-driving vehicle startup later acquired by Uber.

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This week the company known as Dandelion spun off from Alphabet's X group. For those readers not familiar with Alphabet, it's essentially Google's overarching catch-all company (which also catches Google). Dandelion was once part of Alphabet as a startup company - now they're on their own with a cool $2-million in seed round investment to "kick-off its sales and operations."

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Avis Budget Group has announced a new partnership with Alphabet's Waymo, saying that it will maintain and support the latter company's self-driving car fleet. The maintenance/support offered under this partnership will take place at Avis's various rental locations, enabling Waymo to keep its vehicles maintained and ready for use in many locations. The Alphabet company is creating a 600-vehicle fleet, among other things, for riders to utilize.

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Alphabet's Q1 2017 earnings report showed that their "Other Bets" category was doing better than this same time last year in revenue. The same chart also showed that Other Bets was doing worse than this time last year - in operating loss. It might seem on the surface like a losing strategy to push more money into parts of the company that could be considered "bets". But Alphabet isn't the sort of company that drops and runs at the first sign of failure.

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Alphabet CEO Larry Page has released the 2016 Founder's Letter for the company, a glowing "State of the Union" for the umbrella company within which Google and Waymo reside. Published ahead of Alphabet's latest financial results, Page's letter predominantly focuses on the spin-offs of various projects into standalone businesses. That, after all, was the primary intention of the company when it was founded back in 2015.

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