Alphabet

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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If Alphabet managed to pique your interest by launching Waymo and you happen to live in the Phoenix area, good news: beginning today, you can apply to participate in Waymo's early rider program. A trial for Alphabet's self-driving fleet of cars, Waymo doesn't just want to get you from point A to point B once and then call it good. Instead, people who are accepted into this program are invited to use Waymo as much as they need to.

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Alphabet has officially introduced the Verily Study Watch, an unassuming smartwatch packing a bunch of features tailored for the medical and health industries. This watch uses a variety of sensors to monitor a vast array of health metrics, storing the encrypted data on the device until it is synced with Verily's cloud-based platform. Unlike most smartwatches, the Study Watch's battery can go all week without charging, and the internal storage can hold multiple weeks of raw data in between syncs.

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Waymo has asked a court to block Uber from running its self-driving cars, after accusing the ride-sharing company of stealing key sensor tech from the Alphabet-owned firm. The former Google autonomous car division filed against Uber back in February, alleging that Otto, the autonomous tech firm set up by ex-Google engineer Anthony Levandowski and acquired by Uber in 2016 for $680m, copied proprietary information about numerous aspects of the team's hardware and software. Among that treasure-trove, details on the bespoke LIDAR laser ranging system that Waymo developed in-house.

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Uber has denied stealing autonomous car technology from Alphabet's Waymo, after the Google spin-off accused the ride-sharing firm of copying its sensor technology. The allegations were made earlier this week, with Waymo saying that it was alerted to the issue inadvertently when a supplier sent over schematics of one of Uber's LIDAR designs. That design - for the sensor rig which scans the world around a self-driving car, mapping it in real-time - was strikingly similar to technology Waymo says it had developed itself.

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Google, or rather its Alphabet parent, has given up on its plans to get drones to deliver Internet connections to remote places. That means that Project Loon, which now falls unde Alphabet's X subsidiary, will bear the brunt of the responsibilities and expectations. Good thing, then, that the folks behind Loon have stumbled upon a method that allows these Internet-bearing balloons to linger over an area for longer periods of time.

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Google is still the jewel in Alphabet's financial results crown, helping drive revenues up 22-percent year-on-year in Q4 2016, but its "moonshot" projects remain a money pit. The company announced its Q4 and fiscal year 2016 results this week, raking in $26.1bn in quarterly revenues and $5.3bn in GAAP net income. However, its more ambitious Alphabet projects still lag considerably behind the company's more traditional businesses.

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Being a Google X, now just X, project may mean you get some media attention by virtue of association with Google, but that's no guarantee you'll actually survive. Some, like self-driving cars, do become companies of their own. Others, like Barge and Glass, however, might never see the light of day ever again. Joining the latter's ranks is Project Titan, Google's former solar-powered, Internet bearing drone, which has just been declared redundant in lieu of the already in-flight Project Loon balloons.

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