Tag: google maps

Google Alphabet formed as umbrella company

| August 14, 2015

The new name and organization structure has been formed for all of the businesses it owns.

The new Google Alphabet is now being created in order to form an operating structure that will function as a kind of umbrella company that will keep together all the businesses that it owns.

Alphabet Inc. will be run under the leadership of the current CEO and co-founder, Larry Page.

The other co-founder of the company, Sergey Brin, will serve as the president of the new Google Alphabet company. Google, itself, will become one operating unit and will receive a brand new CEO in the change. The chief exec will be Sundar Pichai, who had previously been at the head of Chrome and Android.

The change to Google Alphabet isn’t just a mere change in the name of the company, but is much greater.

Google AlphabetAlphabet isn’t just a new name for the massive tech giant. Instead, it is a reorganization of the entire business. Page made the announcement in a recent blog post, in which he said that the company had been aiming for a version of Google that was “slimmed down”, whereas many of the other companies that it owns, such as Calico biotech and Life Sciences units, would be able to continue their operations as their own companies. The announcement from Page went on to say that every one of those units will be receiving its own CEO.

Page was also aligning his efforts to be able to progress forward in the strategy that has long been the primary goal of innovation at Google. He explained that he and Brin “did a lot of things that seemed crazy at the time,” and that “Many of those crazy things now have over a billion users, like Google Maps, YouTube, Chrome, and Android. And we haven’t stopped there. We are still trying to do things other people think are crazy but we are super excited about.”

Equally, this change will place Google in a position that is far more toward the traditional side of tech than the disruptive side. In essence, Google Alphabet will be a massive conglomerate that is a model that is far from rare as it is often beneficial with key execs are responsible for each unit’s companies, while the higher management keeps its focus on the operations of the whole.

Apple Maps stumbles again with reports of misplaced cities

| September 17, 2014

Once more, the geography test appears to have been failed by the device manufacturer.

Geography was clearly not one of the best classes that Apple Maps took in elementary school, as it has yet again revealed that it has placed certain locations on the world map in the wrong spots.

The mapping service has been especially creative when it came to the placement of certain Canadian cities.

For example, at the moment Apple Maps has relocated the largest city in Canada, Toronto, to the place that actually belongs to the country’s capital, Ottawa. Ottawa has been moved to Toronto’s old location on the edge of Lake Ontario. Though this has caused some to chuckle and others to roll their eyes, when they already know that these positions are not where the cities belong, it does bring to mind some of the disasters that were caused by a previous version of the app that led certain people into rather dangerous and unfortunate circumstances while following their iPhone GPS directions.

Apple Maps has also changed the position of a number of other cities and has misspelled others.

Apple Maps ProblemsFor instance, to continue with the examples on the Canadian map, the city of Edmonton was inaccurately placed to the west of Calgary, in the province Alberta. The apostrophe in the name of the city of St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland, was missing.

Since screen caps of these inaccurate maps from the mobile app started appearing on media sites across the internet, the offending maps have since been taken down. This was not before a new series of jabs have been made toward Apple, which now has a growing reputation for providing consumers with maps and directions that are riddled with errors.

These recent errors are, however, nowhere near the magnitude of the mistakes that were built into the original Apple Maps software that was launched in 2012 in order to replace Google Maps as the default service of that nature in iOS based devices. The problems were profound enough, at that time, that CEO Tim Cook rapidly found himself making an apology for the failures of the service and providing directions that would help the company’s mobile device users to be able to go back to using rival services.