Google to Launch 'Andromeda OS' — An Android-Chrome OS Hybrid

Google's long-rumored Android-Chrome hybrid operating system is expected to debut at the company's upcoming hardware event on October 4. 

The company has been working to merge the two OSes for roughly 3 years with a release planned for 2017, but an "early version" to show things off to the world in 2016.

Android + Chrome = Andromeda 

The hybrid OS, currently nicknamed 'Andromeda,' could be come on a new Pixel laptop as well as Huawei Nexus tablet from Google by Click Here To Read Full Article On TheHackerNews.com

Google launches 360-degree video ads on YouTube

Google will now make your advertisements a bit more interactive. Google-owned YouTubewill now support 360-degree video ads on Chrome, Android and iOS.

According to Google Inside AdWords blog, Beer brand Bud Light is the first advertiser to take advantage of the new feature, which runs on Google’s TrueView ad platform. Users can use their mouse to look around the field while using a PC, or can simply move their smartphone to shift their POV 360 degrees.

The company states that s soon as the ability to create 360 video became available to YouTube creators, brands immediately began experimenting with this new tool. Brands such as Coca-Cola and Nike among others have already showcased stunning videos. The 360-degree Coca-Cola video celebrating the 100th anniversary of their curvy bottle had a 36 percent higher view rate than the standard video, pointed out the report.

It is believed that consumer interaction and sustained attention makes advertisers happy. If a user wishes to advertise on a 360-degree video, they will have to use a camera which Google supports. The supported devices are Ricoh Theta, Kodak SP360, Giroptic 360cam, and the IC Real Tech Allie.

According to a previous report, YouTube had launched 360-degree video support on Android in March. The news was announced on YouTube Creator Blog which stated that with this feature, viewers can see the stage and the crowd of a concert or could even have a choose-your-own-adventure video where people see a different story depending on where they look.

6 Links That Will Show You What Google Knows About You

Want to find out all the things Google knows about you? Here are 6 links that will show you some of the data Google has about you.

1. Find out what Google thinks about you

In order to serve relevant ads, Google collects data about you and creates a profile. You can control and review the information Google has on you here:

http://www.google.com/settings/ads/

Google also has a tool called Google Analytics, that helps publishers see what pages you have viewed on their website, how many times you have visited it, how long did you stay etc. You can opt out if you don’t want this type of data to be collected:

http://tools.google.com/dlpage/gaoptout

2. Find out your location history

If you use Android, your mobile device may be sending your location to Google. You can see your entire location history here:

https://maps.google.com/locationhistory

3. Find out your entire Google Search history

Google saves every single search you have ever done. On top of that, they record every Google ad you have clicked on. This log is available in Google web history controls:

https://www.google.com/history/

4. Get a monthly security and privacy report from Google

Google offers an Account activity page that tells you about all the Google services you are using. You can even enable a monthly report that will be sent to your email:

https://www.google.com/settings/dashboard

5. Find out all the apps and extensions that are accessing your Google data

The Account activity page also offers a list of all the apps that have any type of access to your data. You can see the exact type of permissions granted to the app and revoke access to your data here:

https://security.google.com/settings/security/permissions

6. Export all of your data out of Google

Google lets you export all your data: bookmarks, emails, contacts, drive files, profile info, your youtube videos, photos and more here:

https://www.google.com/takeout

BONUS

Google also keeps a history of your YouTube searches. You can find it here:

https://www.youtube.com/feed/history/search_history

Source: http://www.google.com/goodtoknow/online-safety/security-tools/

WebAssembly — New Standard for Powerful and Faster Web Apps

Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla have joined hands to create code for use in the future web browsers that promises up to 20 times faster performance.

Dubbed WebAssembly (or wasm for short), a project to create a new portable bytecode for the Web that will be more efficient for both desktop as well as mobile web browsers to parse than the complete source code of a Web page or an application.

Bytecode is actually a machine-readable instruction set that is faster for web browsers to load than high-level languages.

WebAssembly — A New File Format to Compile Code

At the moment, browsers use JavaScript to interpret the code and allow functionality on websites such as dynamic content and forms. By default, JavaScript files are downloaded from the server and then compiled by the JavaScript engine in the web browser.

However, improvements have been made to load times via Asm.js — the stripped-down JavaScript dialect described as an "assembly language for the web" — but bytecode-based systems such as .NET are faster and enable efficient compilation.

WebAssembly will introduce a new file format that will allow developers to compile their code to a binary notation, which will then be executed inside each browser's (e.g. Chrome, Firefox, IE/Edge, Safari) JavaScript engine.

If introduced as a standard implemented in all web browsers, WebAssembly could surely bring app-like performance to Web content as well as applications.

Over 20% Faster Performance

Preliminary tests already show that the binary representation is 23 times faster to parse than similar JavaScript applications optimized through Mozilla's widely supported asm.js for browsers, and 20 to 30 percent smaller than its actual file size.

"I'm happy to report that we at Mozilla have started working with Chromium, Edge and WebKit engineers on creating a new standard, WebAssembly," said Mozilla developer Luke Wagner,"that defines a portable, size- and load-time-efficient format and execution model specifically designed to serve as a compilation target for the Web."

Currently, only C and C++ code can be compiled into a WebAssembly (a.k.a wasm) file.

Moreover, the developers of wasm know that JavaScript is supported everywhere so for older web browsers, they are providing a polyfill — a JavaScript script that will convert WebAssembly bytecode into asm.js for those browsers that don't support wasm.

WebAssembly is still in its early days of development with no formal standards as of now. The specifications and the high-level design has also not decided yet, but with all four major browser developers working together, wasm should appear soon.

The future possibilities for WebAssembly file format are being explored on GitHub page. However, a new WebAssembly Community Group has already been formed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which is open for anyone to join. These are FAQs that will give you more details on the group plans.

Source www.TheHackerNews.com

Google Hired 18-year-old: Kid Now Serves 1000 Businesses and Just Got $15 Million

Working at Google is a dream for most of the software engineers. And landing a job at Google just after high school is more like fantasy.

This is a story of one such kid who got a job offer from Google before entering the college at the age of 18. Larry Gadea built a plug-in for Google Desktop Search which would allow the users to find and index files in their computers that Google Desktop Search couldn’t. Larry’s plug-in made the search feature a lot more useful, and it became popular within no time. As Google did not allowed plug-ins at that time, Larry had to hack into their system.

Google immediately scouted for young Larry and offered him a job. After doing internship at Google’s Moutain View Office for three months, he then worked part time through his four years of college in Google Canada.

After college Larry wanted to try something new. He worked with Twitter for three years as a back end engineer. At that time Twitter used to crash a lot, so he created a data center optimization technique and named it “Murder” ( quite an irony) to reduce the ‘Fail Whales’, the frequent crashes Twitter encountered.

Soon Gadea got bored and he wanted to start his own company. He got the idea of a start-up a year later. As he talks to Business Insider

“It was weird that Google and Apple had you type in your information in a computer at the front desk, but smaller companies didn’t have that technology. Either the receptionist would leave the desk and find the person, or there’d be no one at all.”

So Gadea built a software for such applications, called “Envoy”, to check-in people at offices and keep track of visitors.

It would basically allow visitors to sign-in through an iPad app, and print out a name tag with their photos on it. Its latest app can send push notifications to the iPhone and even show the person’s photo on the Apple Watch.

Envoy soon became the most sought after software, signing up over a whopping 1,000 offices. It boasts a client list like Airbnb, Pandora, GoPro, and Tesla.

On Tuesday, Envoy announced a $15 million Series A investment by Andreessen Horowitz, with its general partner Chris Dixon. In November 2014, Envoy has raised $1.5 million from Silicon Valley bigwigs, including Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Quora’s Adam D’Angelo, and Yelp’s Jeremy Stoppelman.

Dixon told the Business Insider

If you go around Silicon Valley today, almost every startup you go to has Envoy at the front desk. It’s sort of become a hit viral app. Larry’s a prodigy. He’s just a classic scrappy, super brilliant Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

Google’s Project Vault: A Secure Computer On A Micro SD Card

From the stage of Google I/O 2015, Google’s Regina Duggan introduced something that wants you to forget the passwords and become one yourself. Google’s Project Vault is a secure computer that is entirely contained on a micro SD card. According to Google, this micro SD card format makes sense because mobile is the future and tons of advanced security functions are already making their appearance on phones.

Google’s Project Vault is something equivalent to these security measures and aims to protect user’s important data. Talking of the analogies, the usual SIM card is something that is already present in a phone and protects stuff important to carriers.

The Vault houses an ARM processor running ARTOS – a secure operating system focused on security and user privacy. It features NFC chip and antenna to ensure the correct authorization. Also, there’s are cryptographic services that include services like hashing, signing, encryption along with a hardware random number generator.

Techcrunch writes that Project Vault provides 2-factor authorization that will be easy to implement and the system will see it as storage device with a standard file system that will work with all operating systems including Windows, Android, OS X and Linux.

Project Vault is a tiny hardware that shrinks a computer into a micro SD card that will make authentication available on each type of device. The Project Vault SDK for developers has already been made available.

This open source development kit from Google ATAP will enable people to test the Project Vault before it is released. Currently, a specialized enterprise version of the Vault is being tested internally at Google.

Right now, Project Vault is in the development phase and could be used to secure your operations and interactions. It seems that Google ATAP is aiming at the right spot i.e. the mobile way.

Source www.fossbytes.com