Research archive for GOOG

Baidu's autonomous taxi efforts are showing signs of life and scale. The company clocked 1.4 million public rides in the first quarter, up 75% from last year, although not all were fully driverless.

YouTube is officially the biggest thing on American TV, again. For the third consecutive month, the platform topped Nielsen's TV usage rankings, securing a record 12.4% share in April. That's ahead of legacy giants like Disney and Paramount, and well above Netflix's 7.5%.

We admire individuals for building huge technology businesses, but I find it even more inspiring when their success allows for something meaningful, especially when it's done quietly.

Google parent company Alphabet is one of the cheapest tech investments around, trading on a forward multiple of only 17. The company is at an inflection point, facing competition from other AI platform providers and a couple of court cases calling it a monopoly. Regulators want to see Alphabet broken up.

The only way for self-driving cars to go mainstream, and for the regulators to give them the green light, is for manufacturers to prove they're safer than human drivers. I see crazy people driving the streets of Jozi every day, so the bar is not high.

Google reported results last week that blew past expectations, along with a 5% dividend increase and $70 billion in stock buybacks. Earnings per share were $2.81, much more than analyst estimates of $2.02.

Did you know that Google has a stake in SpaceX? This investment added rocket fuel to the quarterly numbers. Hidden in the fine print was an $8 billion boost from an early, long-forgotten bet on SpaceX.

Amazon and Microsoft are the big powerhouses in cloud services. Google is a distant third but has been pushing hard to grow the business with good success. Fortunately the demand side of the equation for cloud services is very strong.

Have you ever wondered which company is the most profitable in your portfolio? The team at Carbon Finance have made a lovely image showing the net profits for the Magnificent 7 over a trailing twelve month period.

In early February the CEO of YouTube, Neal Mohan, released an article titled Our big bets for 2025. YouTube turns 20 this year and as Neal mentions in the piece, the platform has become the epicentre of today's culture.

Google reported numbers on Tuesday night, and the shares promptly sank 8% because the cloud division only grew by 30% to $12 billion in revenue, instead of analysts' $12.2 billion forecast. Google said they had more demand than capacity available - good news for future growth, but not great that the current opportunity was missed.

Google just invested over $1 billion in Anthropic, a hot AI startup. This adds to their previous $2 billion investment, giving them a 10% stake. Anthropic's valuation could hit $60 billion with a new funding round.

Google secured a UK court ruling to block Russian media firms from seizing its global assets. The ruling also stops the Russians enforcing massive fines related to YouTube channel bans. The penalties had ballooned to an estimated $125 nonillion, an amount vastly exceeding global economic output.

Google and Samsung are teaming up to take another swing at mixed reality, unveiling Android XR and a Samsung-built headset called Project Moohan. This partnership aims to rival Apple's $3 499 Vision Pro and Meta's mixed-reality devices.

Tech companies have been working on quantum computing chips for years, but they are far from being useful. On Monday, Google revealed their latest chip called Willow. The chip takes just five minutes to complete tasks that would take 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years for some of the world's fastest conventional computers to complete.