Alphabet

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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While the Google-parent company Alphabet is planning to sell its military-related robotics firm Boston Dynamics, that doesn't mean they don't have other robot projects in development. SCHAFT, which operates under Alphabet's X division (formerly known as Google X), has just unveiled a new bipedal creation in Japan at the New Economic Summit. The name is still unknown, but the bot is capable of climbing stairs, walking across uneven terrain, and even self-balancing.

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Smarting from bad publicity over the decision to kill off Revolv hubs in mid-May, Nest has quietly begun offering an olive branch to owners of the death row hardware. The Alphabet-owned smart home team prompted IoT ire this week, when it became more widely realized that as of May 15 users of the Revolv system - which Nest acquired in 2014 - would need to find a new centerpiece to their automation.

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Owners of Nest-owned Revolv smart home hubs will find their automation platform no longer works come May 15th, with the IoT box killed off in favor of Nest. Revolv was one of the earlier attempts at a multi-platform hub, aiming to join the dots between products from different companies rather than try to make every component itself, centralizing control in a single app.

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Google is well-known for their yearly April Fool's pranks. My personal favorite was back in 2004 where this search engine company announced that they'd be offering free email accounts with a whopping 1GB of storage, and that they were hiring for their lunar research facility. Obviously Gmail wasn't a hoax, as it's now one of the most widely-used email services in the world. This year, one of their pranks once again involved Gmail, but this time it backfired.

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Google parent Alphabet is exploring a sale of Boston Dynamics, the specialist creator of creepy robot dogs and humanoids, after failing to come up with a way to turn a profit from the high-tech team. The company, which has worked on various robotics projects with DARPA, the US military, and numerous other firms, was acquired by Google in late 2013, after former exec Andy Rubin decided the company would be a perfect fit for his robot ambitions, a project dubbed Replicant.

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The deal adds up: Ford and Google both want self-driving cars to stop being an experiment and start being a legitimate transport option. According to the rumor-mill, the automaker and the tech giant have been secretly scheming a collaboration on autonomous vehicles for several years, and the time is almost ripe for the fruits of that partnership to be shown off publicly.

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Four months after Google announced its new Alphabet parent, we're still seeing former Google projects and divisions trying to find their proper place in the new, grander scheme of things. And for those that can't, there's always Google X. The seed bed of many experimental and moonshot projects, Google X has formally become an Alphabet subsidiary in October and is now welcoming into its fold two equally amorphous Google experiments, the still unrealized dream of robotics and Google's foray into the skies with drones, both Titan and Wing.

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Alphabet, Google's mother company, might be planning to take on Uber with a car service that doesn't have any drivers involved but in the state of California, that business might not fly. Or in this case, roll. Which is pretty ironic considering it is Alphabet's home base. California's DMV has just released a draft version of rules that will govern autonomous and, among other things, it will require a licensed driver, specially trained by the car company, to always be present in the car, ready to take over when necessary.

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Google's self-driving car division will become a standalone Alphabet company in 2016, insiders claim, ahead of a commercial autonomous vehicle service launch. Currently, the team - which includes high-profile hires from both the automotive and the computer sciences industries - is part of the clandestine Google X lab, the company's research and development division previously responsible for Glass and other projects.

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Google's smart contact lens has been given a company of its own, with Alphabet announcing Verily, its life sciences arm. The new company will take the reins of former Google[x] projects like the glucose-measuring contact lens, attempting to understand and predict diseases using the power of big data, and developing bio-molecular nanotechnology.

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