Alphabet

Nest's vision of the smart home is getting more discriminating today, with a new batch of abilities that allow "Works with Nest" integrated products to react more intelligently to movement and changing environmental conditions. Works with Nest, the Alphabet-owned company's scheme of third-party gadget compatibility, currently has a developer cohort in excess of 20,000 using the smart thermostat and cameras' APIs. Now, there'll be more sharing of specific details about what's going on in the home.

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Google's healthcare-focused sibling Verily may be busy building fitness tracking wearables, but don't confuse its designs with the latest Android Wear smartwatch. The Alphabet division, established in December 2015 after being spun out from Google's own healthcare team, may not be ready to go public with its gadgets - a line-up expected to eventually include smart contact lenses for diabetics and wearables that can monitor for cancer - but an early preview has spilled new details on what one of Verily's gadgets will be like.

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Streaming security cameras are probably the most popular gadget in the connected home, and Nest the best known today. After a fairly slow start after its Dropcam acquisition in 2014, Nest finally has an outdoor model, the unimaginatively titled Nest Cam Outdoor. Like the Nest Cam - designed for indoor use - it's $199.99, though for the full range of features you'll need to cough up a monthly or annual subscription.

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The hype around unmanned aerial vehicles, more popularly known as drones, may have died down a bit, but neither Alphabet nor Amazon are forgetting their ambitious dreams of populating the skies with such robotic delivery personnel. In fact, Google’s parent company will be conducting tests this month to bring it a step closer to that goal. But instead of jumping, or flying, directly into delivering ordered goods, Alphabet’s research arm X will instead simply try to food some lucky students and staff at Virginia Tech with what else but burritos.

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If you've been disappointed by the rather slow roll out of Google Fiber, it would appear you're not alone. Alphabet Inc. seems a little frustrated as well, and as a result, the company will begin looking for alternatives to laying its own cable and building out its network at its current slow pace. These new initiatives would include testing wireless technologies, leasing existing fiber networks, and working with towns and municipalities to get them to lay the fiber networks Google would ultimately use.

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Google Ventures founder and CEO Bill Maris has announced his intention to leave the Alphabet subsidiary he helped bring to life seven years ago. Under his leadership, Google Ventures - known simply as GV since last year - grew to become a venture capital firm that has $2.4 billion in assets, investments in popular companies like Uber and Nest, and offices dotted around the US and UK.

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Google's parent company Alphabet Inc. is soaking it up today, as its financial results for the second quarter are in and they're looking good in almost every area. The company is showing significant year-over-year growth in most areas, with Alphabet CFO Ruth Porat saying that the company is now reaping the benefits of the investments it has made in the mobile and video spaces.

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Putting a multi-million dollar, cutting-edge artificial intelligence in charge of your thermostat might not seem an obvious use, but it's helping Google make big savings on its electricity use. The AI in question is DeepMind, which Google acquired back in 2014 for an estimated $600m+, with one of the learning computer's new roles being management of its data centers.

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It would appear that the parent company of Google, Alphabet, has begun its consumer product investment focus in ernest. A cool $30 million USD has been raised for the company Light from Alphabet's venture capital business, that which used to be called Google Ventures, now just called GV. Light creates a product by the name of L16, a camera which works with 16 cameras inside a single small housing. And consider the possibilities once Google gets ahold of the tech - Tango, anyone?

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Adding on to a feature update to the 3rd-generation Nest (smart thermostat), the company brings on display of current temperature and weather forecast to Farsight. Farsight is a feature that shows information on the smart thermostat to a person looking directly at said thermostat from across the room. Hence the name, far sight, Farsight. In this feature you'll now be able to see two new items you've never been able to see before - at last, and finally.

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This afternoon Alphabet and Nest announced that they'd be switching up CEOs - Fadell is out and Fawaz is in. That's Tony Fadell who, after six years working on Nest, will be moving into an advisor role with Alphabet, working directly with Larry Page. In his place will be Marwan Fawaz, former executive vice president of Motorola Mobility. There, Fawaz served as CEO of Motorola Home, "overseeing vision, strategy, and operations.

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We're more than half a year into Alphabet's formation and we're still seeing the ripples and effects. Some products still haven't found a proper home and some that already do are still being relocated. Take, for example, Alphabet's hardware products, many of which are now coming under a new division inside Google. Interestingly enough, this new Google hardware division will be led by Rick Osterloh, who has now come full circle. Osterloh is partly credited for Motorola's success under Google but left Moto last month after Lenovo completed the mobile company's acquisition.

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