Google confirms Life Sciences as the first new company under the umbrella of Alphabet

Google co-founder and Alphabet president Sergey Brin published a blog post announcing Life Sciences as the first new company created under the Alphabet umbrella. The move was expected, as Alphabet CEO Larry Page wrote during the announcement of the new holding company that this area of focus was the perfect example of why Google needed to restructure itself. It's a bold bet with an enormous potential reward, but one that is far removed from Google's core business, and not likely to be financially self-sustaining anytime soon.

There are a number of already public projects that will be rolled up into life sciences:

    Smart contact lenses that can monitor the blood sugar levels of diabetics

    Nanoparticles that can be used to detect and fight cancer

    A baseline study that will create the richest portrait yet of the human body and genome

The Life Sciences company will be headed up by Andy Conrad, who was previously the head of....Google Life Sciences. Not much will change under Alphabet, in other words, besides a shuffling of titles and corporate structure. Still, there is no denying that the company's goals are an exciting use of Google's ample profits for humanity, if perhaps not as appealing to investors in Google's advertising business.

"They’ll continue to work with other life sciences companies to move new technologies from early stage R&D to clinical testing — and, hopefully — transform the way we detect, prevent, and manage disease," wrote Brin. "The team is relatively new but very diverse, including software engineers, oncologists, and optics experts. This is the type of company we hope will thrive as part of Alphabet and I can’t wait to see what they do next."

Update: This post originally stated that Calico would be part of the new Life Sciences company. Calico was already an independent company from Google and will remain that way under Alphabet. It will not be rolled up into Life Sciences.


Source : The Verge

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Google is launching Sunroof for solar skeptics

In the wake of Google’s enormous corporate restructuring under the Alphabet label, Google has announced its latest non-search-related venture: Google Sunroof. Rather than a direct hardware rollout like the Fiber internet startup, Sunroof is purely about outreach: if you don’t believe that solar power could improve your life, sunroof could show you the light. Currently only available in Boston, Silicon Valley, and the Fresno area, it could soon analyze the solar potential of every home in the country.

What sets solar power apart from other next-gen power offerings is that there will not be any one particular Eureka! moment, before which the human race had Bad Power, and after which it had Good Power. Such a hypothetical moment exists for fusion power, and geothermal, and even truly next-next-gen nuclear — but solar power wants to make ever-more-efficient use of a supply of energy that’s already abundant and available. The challenge isn’t so much inventing the perfect solar cell, as distributing a large enough number of good-enough cells, then slowly upgrading that infrastructure over time.

Google, Elon Musk’s Solar City, and others have found that while solar is making huge strides in some parts of the country, it still runs up against skepticism and ignorance from those it could most benefit. They don’t appreciate just how much money they could save over the long term, or perhaps just the volume of solar power that is currently bouncing from their roofs, unused.Google’s Sunroof is an attempt to address this, encouraging homeowners to invest now to save later by making their own power from sunlight.

Sunroof works by taking your address (in participating cities), and calculating the average hours-per-year of sunlight for a particular rooftop, along with the amount of energy this likely represents, the maximum annual savings that could result, and even local installers to make getting the panels themselves as painless as possible. Help with installation will probably end up being one of the more successful and impactful aspects of Sunroof; Google Flights has a fantastic price-compare feature that absolutely obliterates all other wide-ranging flight search programs, and the solar panel market is far less complex and artificially protected.

This initiative builds off of earlier work from MIT, in which a researcher attempted to achieve the same thing in a less-branded platform. With Google’s marketing power and brand recognition to help, however, the public might actually use this service to make financial decisions going forward. Solar power is a fundamentally different sort of energy, not one we receive through a hole in the wall, but one we make for ourselves.

What’s interesting about solar power is that it could be thought of as a feature of the property — one house might have a nicer view, but the other gets no shade during the majority of the day, and that’s just money in the bank. Could you sue a company for erecting a skyscraper and plunging your home into powerlessness? If the government has verbally and financially encouraged you invest in solar power, does solar power become part of the property value? Sunroof is the sort of initiative that could make solar power popular enough to make those sorts of questions pressing.

Myself, I’ve never understood why solar focuses on home-owners, rather than the real-estate business. Getting people to invest $10,000 now, and make it back over several years, is a tough sell. But getting people to invest $10,000 now for an extra $15,000 or $20,000 when you sell in six months? Historically, that’s been a much more successful model. Smart real-estate agents will be looking to Sunroof as a means to prove extra value to potential buyers — and a possible place for value-added renovation.

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BMW: Alphabet Is More Than A Name To Us

Google is now the largest subsidiary corporation of Alphabet, the newly established holding company that manages Google and all of the company’s side projects. But Alphabet’s website isabc.xyz because Alphabet.com is owned by Alphabet, a BMW-owned fleet management service. Even though only a few people had ever heard of BMW’s Alphabet before, the company clearly isn’t going to let all of this free publicity just sit there unconverted.

So BMW’s Alphabet had a little bit of fun with Google and posted its own version of theGoogle alphabet. The tagline: Because Alphabet is more than a name to us.

BMW could have come up with a funnier list, but then Alphabet is a fleet-management company. There’s only so much fun you can have with that.

BMW has made it pretty clear that it won’t relinquish the Alphabet.com name to Google. And unless Alphabet (the abc.xyz Alphabet, that is) decides to launch a car company under the Alphabet name, it’s probably okay from a trademark point of view.

Still, it’s amusing — and a bit bizarre — that Google/Alphabet decided on this name for its new holding company even though it couldn’t secure the most obvious domain name (or social media accounts, for that matter).

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BMW Looks At Alphabet For Trademark Infringement

Less than a week into its birth Alphabet is already in hot water, maybe. German Car maker BMW is looking into Alphabet for trademark infringement of one of its subsidiaries. First; did anyone other than BMW employees even know a division of BMW was called Alphabet. The answer to that question is most likely no. So if the general public had no idea, probably most people in the Google camp didn't know either. Nonetheless BMW is moving ahead with its investigation, even though no legal action is about to happen. A BMW spokeswoman Micaela Sandstede had this to say “We are examining whether there are any implications over trademarks.” BMW also owns a domain name with the name Alphabet, so this is not the first time someone has tried to steal Alphabet from BMW. Micaela Sandstede went on to say BMW was “not informed ahead of time of plans by Mr. Page and Mr. Brin to create a company called Alphabet and had not received any offers to buy the Internet domain or the trademark.” BMW spokeswoman Micaela Sandstede continued by saying Alphabet is a “very active” part of BMW's business. BMW's Alphabet is a subsidiary that services to companies with vehicle fleets, which sounds nothing like Google's Alphabet.

No matter what BMW finds, this seems to be a losing battle on their part. For BMW to prove anything, they would have to be able to produce evidence that Alphabet intends to confuse BMW's customers and offers services close to what BMW is offering. Alphabet has that covered seeing as though all the companies under the Alphabet umbrella range from things like life longevity and who clicks the most ads in a day. So far none of these firms features luxury automobiles. Another feather in Google's cap is that when it announced Alphabet it made it clear Alphabet is just the name of all the companies under it. Alphabet does not create or design anything. So one can imagine if a corporation does not produce a product, how can it be sued at all.

Alphabet is a relatively common company name here in the United States with 103 different trademarks already on the books. Information like that kind of makes you wonder if any other corporation had renamed itself Alphabet would BMW makes this much of a fuss. Who knows, but by the look of things it seems like the Alphabet name in the tech world is here to stay.

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