Once the deal is approved, Fabric’s team will join Google’s Developer Products Group and work with the company’s Firebase application development platform team.

“Fabric and Firebase operate mobile platforms with unique strengths in the market today,” Fabric’s vice president of engineering Rich Paret said in a blog announcing the planned acquisition. “We’re excited to combine these platforms together to make the best mobile developer platform in the world for app teams.”

Twitter announced Fabric in October 2014 as a modular platform for building mobile applications. The platform consists of multiple kits that are designed to help developers address mobile app stability issues as well as those pertaining to application distribution and revenue generation.

One of Fabric’s most popular and downloaded products is Crashlytics, a kit, which according to Fabric, can help developers detect, access and fix bugs in their code much faster than other available tools.

Developers can use Crashlytics to isolate the root cause of a problem down to the exact line of code, according to Fabric. As part of the Crashlytics kit, Fabric includes a real-time app analytics component called Answers by Crashlytics and a separate user feedback component that allows developers to assess the overall health of an application.

By acquiring Fabric, Google will also gain access to a so-called Twitter Kit that developers can use to leverage Twitter for distributing mobile applications. The kit includes a native Tweet embedding capability that gives developers a way to place Tweets in their applications with a few lines of code. Also part of the Twitter kit is a sign-in feature that developers can use to enable users of their applications to login via Twitter.

Another kit that likely stoked Google’s interest in Fabric is MoPub, which Twitter has described as a monetization platform for mobile application developers. The kit gives developers a way to more easily integrate ad-serving features in their mobile applications and to ensure that applications work smoothly with ads and advertisers across multiple mobile ad networks.

Fabric’s Twitter Kit also includes Digits, a SMS authentication tool that makes it easier for developers to enable application sign-in via mobile phone numbers instead of usernames and passwords.

More than 580,000 application developers have downloaded Fabric and applications developed on the platform are currently installed on some 2.5 billion mobile devices worldwide, according to Twitter.

In a blog, Google Firebase product manager Francis Ma noted that after the acquisition is complete, Crashlytics would become Firebase’s main crash reporting product. Google will release more details about how Fabric’s products will be integrated with those from Firebase in coming weeks and months, he added.

“The integration of Fabric is part of our larger, long-term effort of delivering a comprehensive suite of features for iOS, Android and mobile Web app development,” Ma said.

Google acquired Firebase in 2014 and since then has focused on making it a unified app development platform for Android and IOS applications as well as for mobile Web development purposes.

Last May Google added several new tools to Firebase including an analytics component, a cloud message feature and a remote configuration capability. As part of the Firebase expansion last year, Google introduced the crash reporting capability that will soon be replaced by Crashlytics and a test lab feature for finding vulnerabilities in Android apps.

For Twitter, the Fabric sale continues the company’s efforts to improve its bottom line by divesting itself of non-essential businesses. Last October, the company announced that it would be killing off its Vine video-sharing network and reincarnating it as a mobile app for Android and iOS.

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The patent application published on Dec 22, 2016 is titled “Determining Pickup and Destination Locations for Autonomous Vehicles”. It describes a system for determining if a passenger pickup location or destination is accessible or safe for a self-driven vehicle and to suggest alternate locations as needed.

The technology, according to the patent application, is required because self-driving vehicles may not always be able to operate everywhere a human driver would.

For instance, construction activity or the presence of emergency vehicles at a particular location could hamper the ability of an autonomous vehicle to safely pickup, wait for or drop off a passenger. In addition, road conditions, like speed limits that are too high for an autonomous vehicle make it necessary for a system capable of determining if a received pickup location or destination address is in fact reachable.

In such situations, the technology for which Google has filed a patent would suggest alternate locations that are in relatively close proximity to the original pickup or drop off location.

“The technology relates to an autonomous vehicle service for maneuvering a user or passenger to a destination, for example taking a trip, autonomously,” the patent application noted. “In order to do so, the user may provide a pickup location and one or more destination locations for the trip to a centralized dispatching system via a client computing device, such as a mobile phone” and the system will then identify the most efficient way to fulfill the user’s request.

Google, like many other companies routinely files patent applications for technologies that it may or may not end up using. In this case, though, the proposed system appears to be consistent with the company’s reported plans to enter the ride-sharing space with autonomous vehicles.

Back in 2015, Bloomberg News had reported on Google’s plan to launch a car-hailing service similar to Uber’s that would operate using a fleet of autonomous vehicles.

Last year, the company began testing a carpooling service in California that would give office workers a way to connect with commuters willing to share rides to their work place and back in return for splitting the costs of the trip. The company has been testing a similar service in Israel as well and is reportedly planning on launching it in major cities around the world.

So far though, Google has yet to launch or test a ride-sharing service involving the use of autonomous vehicles like Uber has been doing in Pittsburgh for the past several months.

Earlier this week, John Krafcik, CEO of Google’s newly spun-out autonomous car venture Waymo, announced the company’s plans to roll-out a fleet of self-driving Chrysler Pacifica minivans in California and Arizona by the end of this month. There’s no indication yet of how exactly the vehicles will be used or by whom.

Patent Yogi reported on Google’s new patent application first.

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The move caps a series of initiatives that Google launched with the Cloud Foundry community this year such as the delivery of BOSH Google CPI, a cloud software deployment and management tool and enabling Cloud Foundry on Google’s Compute Engine Platform.

“Collaborating with customers and partners as we’ve worked on these projects made the decision to join the Cloud Foundry Foundation simple,” said Brian Stevens, vice president of Google Cloud in a blog. “It’s an energized community with vast enterprise adoption,” he said. And the technical collaboration between members of the various teams involved in the Foundation has been notable, he added.

Cloud Foundry Foundation is a non-profit organization that was created last year to administer and manage the Cloud Foundry open source cloud-computing platform that VMWare originally developed. The Foundation’s 60-plus members include technology giants like IBM, Cisco, SAP, Accenture, Verizon, Citi and Fujitsu. With this week’s announcement, Google has joined the foundation as a Gold level member.

Cloud Foundry itself is a platform-as-a-service that is designed to let developers deploy and operate applications written in any of multiple supported programming languages and frameworks. One of the major appeals of the software is that it allows developers to deploy cloud applications without having to worry about the underlying web server or database.

The Cloud Foundry Foundation describes Cloud Foundry as open source software that enterprise can use to develop and run cloud apps on their own infrastructure or on an Infrastructure as a Service such as Amazon Web Services and OpenStack.

Cloud Foundry is optimized to remove the cost and complexity involved in configuring the underlying infrastructure for running cloud applications. “Developers can deploy their apps to Cloud Foundry using their existing tools and with zero modification to their code,” the Foundation claims.

As a member of the Foundation, Google will be part of a group that is responsible for driving adoption and awareness of the technology through collaborative development and marketing activities. It also means that developers will be able to use Cloud Foundry to deploy apps on Google’s Compute Engine cloud platform.

Google has said that it wants to make its cloud platform the most open environment as possible for developers and businesses. The company has taken several steps in recent months to follow through on this commitment.

In September for instance, Google updated its BigQuery fully managed data warehouse with support for Standard SQL. The company also added features that it said would improve BigQuery’s compatibility with more data tools than previously supported.

Google claims that its cloud platform now serves over 1 billion users, putting the service on par with other Google services like YouTube and Gmail. The company recently opened eight new Google Cloud Regions around the globe to meet the growing demand for the service. The new locations include Mumbai, London, Frankfurt, Singapore and Sydney. The company has committed to opening another nine regions next year.

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Embedding Projector is part of TensorFlow, the machine learning technology behind some popular Google services like image search, Smart Reply in Inbox and Google Translate. The company released TensorFlow to the open source community last year in order to spur more development activity in the field.

In a technical paper, Google researchers described the Embedding Projector as an interactive visualization tool that developers can use to interpret machine-learning models that rely on what are known as “embeddings.”

“With the widespread adoption of ML systems, it is increasingly important for research scientists to be able to explore how the data is being interpreted by the models,” Google engineer Daniel Smilkov said in Google’s open source blog.

Embeddings are basically mathematical vector representations of different facets of data like images, words and numerals. It is way to translate data into a format that machine- learning algorithms can process.

For example, in order to train a machine-learning model to predict the meaning of text, developers might create a word embedding comprised of a large collection of words, each represented by a numerical value in 3D space and in close proximity to words with contextual similarity.

“Machine learning researchers and developers often need to explore the properties of a specific embedding to understand the behavior of their model,” Google researchers explained in a recent technical paper.

“An engineer who creates an embedding of songs for a recommendation system might want to verify that the nearest neighbors of 70’s era rock band Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” include “Whole Lotta Love” and not “Let It Go” from Frozen”.

An efficient way to do this type of analysis, according to the researchers is to visualize embeddings, using a tool like Embedding Projector. The tool allows developers to navigate through 3D and 2D views of their data to see how well their machine learning algorithms are doing at interpreting it.

Embedding Projector gives developers three different ways of enabling 3D and 2D views of a data set. The tools allows developers to explore data for the most influential data elements and make sure than an embedding preserves the original meaning of the data, according to Google.

With this week’s announcement Embedding Projector is now available to anyone as a standalone web application or integrated into the TensorFlow platform.

Users can upload their own data into the tool or explore its capabilities by using sample datasets provided by Google. The goal is to give the research community and developers a way to explore machine-learning applications and to refine them. It will also give developers a way to better understand how machine-learning algorithms interpret data sets, the researchers said.

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The milestone will not mean that all of Google’s data centers and offices will be powered solely by renewable energy sources, as many have presumed. The company will continue to remain hooked up to the electric grid and draw power from the grid on a continuous basis even when its solar and wind sources may not be producing electricity.

Instead what the milestone means is that the total amount of electricity Google puts into the grid system from renewable sources each year will equal the company’s total energy consumption worldwide.

“I’m thrilled to announce that in 2017 Google will reach 100 percent renewable energy for our global operations,” the company’s senior vice president technical infrastructure Urs Holzle announced in a blog.

Starting with a 2010 agreement to purchase all electricity from a 114-megawatt wind farm in Iowa, Google has entered into multiple long-term contracts for renewable energy from sources around the world. In 2017, Google is on track to nearly double its annual purchases of renewable energy and match the total energy consumption requirements of its data centers and offices worldwide, Holzle said.

The use of renewable energy will not only help Google reduce its carbon footprint, but also makes business sense for the company. Electricity costs represent one of the largest portions of Google’s operating expenses presently and the company has an opportunity to drive those costs down by tapping wind and solar power as energy sources, Holzle said.

Over the past six years, the costs associated with wind-powered energy have dropped 60 percent while solar energy costs have dropped 80 percent, he said. The stable costs associated with renewable energy will also protect Google against unpredictable swings in electricity costs in future, Holzle said.

Google currently has investments in 20 wind and solar energy projects scattered around the world. In 2015 alone, the company entered into six new agreements to purchase a total 842 megawatts of renewable energy, which it says is the largest aggregate purchase ever by a non-utility company.

In total, Google has committed to spending some $3.5 billion in total over the next few years to purchase a staggering 2.6 gigawatts of energy globally. “That’s bigger than many large utilities and more than twice as much as the 1.21 gigawatts it took to send Marty McFly back to the future,” Holzle said referring to the 1985 sci-fi movie “Back to the Future”.

As one of the larger consumers of electricity in the private sector, Google has for years looked for ways to reduce both energy consumption and costs. The company says its data centers require about 50 percent less energy to operate than typical data centers of comparable size as a result of improvements it has made in server and building design. Google says that almost all of the energy that its data centers use go towards powering IT equipment unlike other data centers which consume a substantial amount of energy for non-computing purposes like power conversion and cooling.

The average annual power usage effectiveness (PUE) of Google’s collection of global data centers was 1.12 in 2015, which is much lower than the industry average of 1.7. PUE is a metric used to measure data center energy efficiency. Google’s PUE is about six times lower than the overhead energy used by the average data center for every piece of IT equipment, the company has noted.

The post Google’s Renewable Energy Purchases to Match Total Office Consumption appeared first on eWEEK.

In a blog post this week, the company described App Maker as a low-code tool that will let software developers and even systems administrators and analysts quickly assemble applications using templates, drag and drop components and other features.

A handful of large G Suite customers have previewed App Maker over the past few months said Elissa Murphy, vice president of engineering for G Suite in the blog. Many of them have already successfully built and deployed applications using the tool including those for tracking office inventory orders, monitoring for suspicious logins and converting analog claims processes to digital, she said.

Analyst firm Forrester Research describes low-code development platforms as those that enable software development with minimal hand coding or upfront investments in training, setup and deployment.

Low-code development is a response to the general slowness of hand-coded development methods and is designed to help accelerate application delivery times. It can also help development teams respond more quickly to changing business and customer requirements for software functionality, according to Forrester. Usage of such platforms is gaining especially for the developments of customer facing applications, the analyst firm has noted.

Google App Maker comes with a cloud based integrated development environment that includes features like built-in application templates, a drag-and-drop user interface and point and click data modeling. It supports multiple language and tool standards such as HTML, Javascript, Cascading Style Sheets as well as Google’s material design framework so developers can build apps quickly using their existing knowledge and skills, Murphy said.

Applications that are built using the tool can be easily integrated with Google’s G Suite apps as well as third-party apps courtesy of the tool’s built in support for a wide range of application programming interfaces and data sources. The tool also is designed to let developers deploy applications that work well in the cloud without having to worry about issues like capacity planning, and infrastructure monitoring and security, she added.

In addition to the new application development tool, Google this week also announced an expanded list of third-party applications that integrate easily with G Suite. Among the seven vendors whose products have been added to Google’s so-called Recommended for G Suite program are Asana, a vendor of project and process management software; Freshdesk, a customer support software vendor; LumApps, a maker of software for building corporate and social portals and encryption software vendor Virtru.

Google launched the vendor recommendation program last year as part of what it described as an effort to help its enterprise cloud customers make more informed choices. According to the company, Google and a third-party security vendor review all third-party applications to ensure they meet relevant quality and security standards before adding the products to the recommended list.

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The company this week announced a new real-time component to its Popular Times feature in Google Search and Maps that lets people check how busy a particular shopping location is at that moment.

The goal is to give people information for deciding where and when to go shopping based on how crowded or not a specific retail location might be at the time.

Google introduced Popular Times in Google Search in June 2015 as a tool to help people figure out how to avoid long lines and waiting when shopping.

Up to now, the feature has let users check how busy a business location or attraction is likely to be on different days of the week based on past traffic at the location.

It has also let users search how busy a location gets through the day including periods when crowds have historically been the highest and when it has been the lowest. In addition, the company has typically included the most popular times and the average duration of a visit or length of time that people might spend at a particular shopping or business location.

To compute Popular Times Google uses anonymized data that is collected and aggregated from people who have opted-in to having their location history tracked and archived. Popular times and visit durations are shown for all businesses where Google determines there’s data from a sufficient number of people to make an estimate.

The information appears as a Popular Times graph under all of the other information on a business that Google presents in Search and Maps such as is location, website address, phone number and operating hours.

Businesses cannot add the data on their own and Google says it does not offer up the information for locations where there are not enough visitors.

The live visit data that Google has now begun offering will reflect how active the location is in real-time. The data will be constantly updated and overlaid on top of the popular times graph and will let users compare present activity with what is typical for the location at the time.

In addition to getting real-time updates in Popular Times, people using Google Search will now be able to get information on operating hours for all the special services and different departments that a store might have.

For instance, if a store has different service hours for its pharmacy or for its food delivery business or its auto repair shop, Google will now display that information so users can plan their trip better.

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Google’s Chrome browser and other popular browsers will display a notice to users who visit such sites warning them about the potential for their computers to become infected with unwanted software, malware, phishing and other security threats.

The warning will remain in place for a minimum of one month and will only be removed after that period if Google determines the site no longer poses a security threat to users. The owner of a website classified as a Repeat Offender will not have an opportunity to get Google to reconsider the labeling for one full month, even if all identified security issues have been addressed before then.

The new policy is designed to punish website owners whom Google considers to be frequent abusers of its Safe Browsing requirements.

Google introduced Safe Browsing about nine years ago as a way to protect users from malicious websites. It basically serves as an alerting mechanism when users arrive on a website that Google’s web crawlers determine is being used to serve up unwanted ads, software, spam and malware or is being used for phishing and other social engineering purposes.

Till last December, Safe Browsing alerts were available only to desktop users. But since then, Google has enabled it by default for versions of Chrome running on its Android operating system.

Google has used the Safe Browsing mechanism to also warn website owners and administrators about their sites being flagged for potential security issues. In many cases, the warnings have alerted administrators about potential security issues on their sites, which even they had not been aware of up to that point.

Google’s policy till this week has been to keep the browser warnings in place till the website owner remediates the issue. Once fixed, webmasters could ask Google to review the site once again and remove the browser warnings. Google also uses an automatic verification process under which it reviews flagged sites on its own and removes the alerts if it determines all violations have been addressed.

“However, over time, we’ve observed that a small number of websites will cease harming users for long enough to have the warnings removed, and will then revert to harmful activity,” said Brooke Heinichen, a member of Google’s Safe Browsing team in a blog post this week.

The tougher Safe Browsing policy that Google announced this week is a response to this loophole, Heinichen said.

For classification purposes, Repeat Offenders are websites that frequently keep switching between compliant and non-compliant behavior with the sole purpose of gaming the system according to Heinichen.

A website that is hacked and is being used for malicious purposes will not be classified as a repeat offender. That tag is reserved solely for sites that deliberately host harmful content. Heinichen did not say how Google will make that determination or what factors it will consider to determine if a site serving up malware is compromised or was set up solely for that purpose.

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The company’s search index will continue to be a single index of websites and applications. But Google’s search algorithms increasingly will use primarily the mobile version for indexing sites, ranking pages and for showing snippets from a webpage or website in its results.

In a blog post, Google product manager Doantam Phan described the move as an important shift for the company and for website owners in general. The goal is to improve search results as users increasingly move to a mobile-first world, Phan said.

“Today, most people are searching on Google using a mobile device,” he said. “However, our ranking systems still typically look at the desktop version of a page’s content to evaluate its relevance to the user.”

Google will implement the shift in increments over the next several months. The company will test the use of mobile content for primary indexing on a small scale initially and ramp it up only after ensuring that the change delivers a better experience for Google Search users, Phan said.

Websites that have the same content and markup for both their desktop and mobile content should feel little impact from the change and will continue to be indexed in the same way.

But website owners should consider making some changes to their sites in when the content and markup are different for desktop and mobile, Phan noted.

For example, such sites should make sure they serve structured markup for both their mobile and desktop versions. But they should be careful to use only relevant markup when adding structured data to a mobile site, Phan said.

He pointed website owners to a Google Structured Data Testing Tool they can use to verify if the structured markup they have is consistent across both their mobile and desktop environments.

Website owners who have only verified their desktop sites on Google’s Search Console should consider adding the mobile version, as well. They also need to ensure that the mobile site is accessible to Google’s web-crawling bots by using tools such as the robots.txt testing tool.

Google’s shift will not affect sites that maintain only a desktop version. In such situations, Google will continue to index the site the same way it always has, even though it will use a mobile user agent to view the site.

Phan offered some advice for people and organizations building mobile versions of their websites. “Keep in mind that a functional desktop-oriented site can be better than a broken or incomplete mobile version of the site. It’s better for you to build up your mobile site and launch it when ready.”

Google’s planned change to its site indexing method is consistent with the company’s ongoing efforts to get website owners to making their sites more mobile-friendly.

In the past year, for instance, the company has been encouraging site owners to implement a framework called Accelerated Mobile Pages to ensure their pages load faster on mobile pages compared to standard HTML pages. Recently, the company announced that sites that are AMP-enabled will start gaining more prominence in search results compared with non-AMP sites.

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The announcements, at Google’s NEXT user event in London this week, included new data life cycle management tools, price cuts and the addition of several new partners to the Google storage ecosystem.

Coldline, the name for the company’s new storage option, is aimed at businesses looking to archive rarely used data—or cold data—but still require quick, low-latency access to it when needed. Google is touting it as perfect for archiving years’ worth of big data or multimedia content.

The option is priced at $0.007 per gigabyte of data to store per month and an additional 5 cents per GB to retrieve. The company claims the pricing makes Coldline the most economic option available to companies for storing datasets that are accessed less than once a year.

Google is offering a Cloud Storage Transfer service and a Switch and Save promotion for companies interested in migrating their archived data to Coldline storage. Depending on the type of data that is migrated, enterprises can become eligible to store potentially up to 100 petabytes of data for free for several months, Google Product Manager Kirill Tropin said announcing the new offering on the Google Cloud Platform blog this week.

Along with Coldline, Google also announced changes to its existing storage options.

Enterprises signed up for the company’s Standard storage option within a regional location have been converted to a new Cloud Storage Regional service, which offers essentially the same storage features and capabilities but at a 23 percent lower price point.

Google has positioned the option as ideal for enterprises looking to maintain their compute and storage resources within the same region. Like all of Google’s storage services, the Regional option offers enterprises millisecond access times to stored data. The service is priced at 2 cents per GB of data and comes with a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee.

In addition, Google has converted all customers using its existing Standard storage option across multiple regions to a new Multi-Regional storage class. Priced at 2.6 cents per GB of data, the multiregional option is the costliest of the cloud storage options that Google announced this week and is aimed at organizations looking for near continuous data availability across regions.

“Regional closely addresses similar use-cases in terms of features, but at a much lower cost,” a Google spokeswoman said.

“Multi-Regional is generally a new offering class for us. By allowing customers to host in two plus regions, it offers more flexibility for use-cases like disaster recovery than Standard previously did,” she said.

The fourth storage option that enterprises now have is Google Nearline and is meant as a storage option for infrequently accessed data such as long-tail content and data backups. The Nearline option starts at 1 cent per GB.

Google this week also announced a beta version of a data management capability that it said will make it easier for enterprises to use and manage different cloud storage options for different business needs. A life cycle policy feature supports automatic transition of data from one storage type to another based on the age of the data and the frequency with which it is accessed.

In addition to the storage refreshes, Google this week announced several new partners whose technologies it said have been integrated with Google Cloud Storage. Among them are Veritas, Fastly, Cloudberry Lab, Komprise and Stor Reduce.

The partners deliver a range of capabilities. Cludberry’s Backup technology for instance will let organizations do real-time or scheduled data backup, encryption and restoration in Google’s cloud storage environment. Similarly, Stor Reduce offers what it calls inline deduplication software for moving petabytes of data to Coldline.

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