Google

On Tuesday, Google released a developer preview of ARCore, a platform for developers to build augmented reality apps for Android. ARCore brings augmented reality to the world’s largest mobile operating system, starting with just the Pixel and Galaxy S8, but…

In December, Apple will ship HomePod, a smart speaker with a unique focus on music. Don’t be fooled, however, by HomePod’s music-focused marketing; Apple has a grander vision than delivering a better sounding Echo. The company is making Siri a…

AI is one of the core themes on which we focus at Loup Ventures. And as analysts, we heard Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple emphasizing their focus on AI over the last several years. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has commented…

As a part of our continuing efforts to understand the ways and speed at which artificial intelligence enters our everyday lives, we reexamined two home assistants based on a study we performed in February.  The two most popular assistants, Google…

Following the company’s Q2 earnings release, Google shares are down 3%, based on higher traffic acquisition costs (TAC). As a percentage of revenue, TAC increased to 11.1%, up from 8.8% a year ago. We think this is a classic example…

Written by guest author Lindsay Boyajian at Conductor Since Amazon announced its acquisition of Whole Foods, the running joke across social media has been, “Jeff Bezos said to Alexa, ‘Buy me something on Whole Foods,’ and Alexa bought Whole Foods.” This quip highlights the…

The most important lesson from Uber’s travails is that bad culture doesn’t scale. Talented teams with bad culture can build fantastic businesses, but not businesses that last. A unicorn with bad culture is a unicorn with a bomb strapped to its back…

At the Viva Tech conference in Paris, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt stated that he believes automation will create more jobs, not eliminate them. I think he’s wrong, and I hope he’s wrong. Disagreeing with the Chairman of the most advanced AI company in the…

This week Google hosted it’s annual I/O developer conference. On day one, the company focused on their innovation in the artificial intelligence space. On day two, they talked about new VR products. Here’s our take on what the latest out…

The importance of voice assistants in the screenless future is hard to overestimate. We see speech-driven user interfaces as a key component of the next computing paradigm, so it’s helpful to understand empirically where each platform stands today. In February, we compared…

Google CEO Sundar Pichai used tonight’s Q1 call to double-down on his “AI-first” mantra.  Several areas were highlighted, where Google will lead and define its mission to organize the world’s information with machine learning.  Beyond AI initiatives to enhance core…

Amazon’s third-party developer strategy has Alexa looking like the Gingerbread Man of digital assistants. After taking over CES in January with multiple Alexa-enable devices, there’s been little pause in Alexa skills and device-enabled growth. As of this writing, we count more…