A little over two years after its public debut, Mineral is becoming its own Alphabet company. The team, which was formerly known as the "Computational Agriculture Project" (no prizes for guessing why they adopted the new name), just graduated from the X "moonshot" labs. "After five years incubating our technology at X, Alphabet's moonshot factory, Mineral is now an Alphabet company," CEO Elliott Grant said in a blog post. "Our mission is to help scale sustainable agriculture. We're doing this by developing a platform and tools that help gather, organize, and understand never-before known or understood information about the plant world -- and make it useful and actionable."

The state of Michigan wants to build the autonomous roadway of the future. Normally that in itself would be interesting enough, but there's also the company it's partnering with to make the project a reality. The state will work with a firm called Cavnue. Cavnue's parent company is Sidewalk Infrastructure Partners (SIP), which itself is a spinoff of Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs. If you've followed Engadget's coverage of the recently canceled Toronto Smart City project, you'll know all about Sidewalk Labs.

Last week, Waymo announced a partnership to build autonomous Jaguar vehicles for its upcoming self-driving taxi service, which will augment its existing fleet of Chryslers. But today Bloomberg reported that the Alphabet company is nearing a deal with a third automaker, Honda, that may lead the pair to collaborate on an entirely new vehicle. The deal will reportedly boost Waymo's capacity in'delivery and logistics' rather than moving people, which its anticipated ride-sharing service had assumedly been focused on. While Waymo has been in talks with Honda since late 2016, this news came from Bloomberg's profile of John Krafcik, the Alphabet company's chief executive. Whether both companies' collaborative plans include making a wholly new vehicle is still speculative.

Alphabet's "moonshot factory" has been incubating its answer to the massive and growing problem of hacking and data theft. It's a new independent Alphabet company called Chronicle. The new company's mission is to give large companies a strong ally in identifying and zapping security threats before they cause harm. Chronicle CEO Stephen Gillett explained on a call with reporters Wednesday that most companies lack the speed and computing power needed to track down threats. "Our goal is to 10X the speed of finding threats and to find more efficient ways ways to analyze threats," Gillett said.

Uber has finally responded via the courts to Waymo's allegation that it's using the Alphabet company's Lidar technology. The ride-hailing company called Waymo's injunction motion to stop using technology that was allegedly misappropriated from Google servers a "misfire." It also insisted that because it's developing multi-lens LiDAR technology instead of the single-lens that Waymo uses, it's not using stolen technology. Waymo's lawsuit against Uber claims that former Google engineer, Anthony Levandowski stole 14,000 confidential documents pertaining to the search giant's LiDAR tech and that Uber is using the technology found in those documents. After he left Google Levandowski went on to form the self-driving trucking company Otto that was acquired by Uber for $680 million.

Google, the company that has done more than any other to democratize mobile computing, argues that we are moving away from a mobile-first world. Indeed, at the company's wide-ranging product reveal on Tuesday in San Francisco, it rarely mentioned Android at all. Yet all the products that Google announced at its event introduced either complemented or reacted to the phone. In addition to the Pixel smartphone itself, the first Daydream VR goggles and controller are aggressively priced at 79 in part due to their reliance on Daydream-ready smartphones such as the Pixel (as opposed to PC-based systems from HTC and Oculus). And the Chromecast Ultra seeks to provide more 4K programming options for TV watchers by leveraging the phone as a content source.

I mean the Alphabet with a capital "A". It is the parent company of Google, and was created in October 2015 in a huge overhaul of the Californian tech giant. Google is now just one letter of this Alphabet, with other divisions and projects not part of Google's core products spun out into separate "Alphabet companies," each with their own CEO. Alphabet gives its CEO Larry Page and the senior leadership significantly more freedom to chase exciting projects and acquisitions -- regardless of how they fit into Google's mission "to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." As of July 2016, there are 11 confirmed Alphabet companies -- with another, the Self-Driving Car Project, reportedly becoming one this year (Google declined to confirm or deny this). Recent additions include DeepMind, a London artificial intelligence startup which previously sat under Google, but has now been spun out; and Jigsaw, previously called Google Ideas, which acts as a kind of think tank.