Google has confirmed in a teaser video that its upcoming line of smartphones includes a new foldable model. The company called the Pixel 9 Pro Fold a "foldable phone built for the Gemini era" in its promo tweet, and it even focused on its gen AI chatbot in the video. Similar to the non-foldable Pixel 9 Pro, this model also has a prominent camera bump. Its lenses are arranged vertically near one side of the phone, so the camera bump is mostly there and doesn't take up the whole width of the folded device. A foldable phone built for the Gemini era.

Google usually reveals a new Pixel smartphone in the autumn – but this year it seems to be wasting no time to get ahead of the curve. The tech giant has confirmed that its annual'Made by Google' unveiling event will take place on August 13, where it will showcase new devices and software. It's expected to announce the latest smartphone in its Pixel line, the Pixel 9, which could be packed with a range of new AI features to rival Apple. The event may even launch a successor to its first foldable phone, the Pixel Fold that was released last year for an eyewatering 1,749. A brief teaser video contains the Google Pixel branding and the number nine in Roman numerals – referring to the ninth phone in the series. Google's teaser video shows the outline of a smartphone with 9 in Roman numerals - a clear indication it's preparing the new hotly-anticpated device The video, entitled'AI... meet IX at Made by Google', confirms the date of the event in Roman numerals – VIII-XIII-MMXXIV, or August 13, 2024.

Google is infamous for spinning up products and killing them off, often in very short order. But the tech giant's ambitions stretch into many domains that touch human lives these days. And -- it turns out -- so does Google's tendency to kill off products that its PR has previously touted as "life saving". To wit: Following a recent reconfiguration of Google's health efforts -- reported earlier by Business Insider -- the tech giant confirmed to TechCrunch that it is decommissioning its clinician support app, Streams. The app, which Google Health PR bills as a "mobile medical device", was developed back in 2015 by DeepMind, an AI division of Google -- and has been used by the U.K.'s National Health Service in the years since, with a number of NHS Trusts inking deals with DeepMind Health to roll out Streams to their clinicians.

A program called Project Maven is utilising the technology to automate the analysis of objects in the enormous amount of images that are captured by the Department of Defence's surveillance drones - also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Gizmodo reported that some Google employees were "outraged that the company would offer resources to the military for surveillance technology involved in drone operations". There have been almost 30,000 coalition strikes against targets in Iraq and Syria since the US-led intervention in 2014, the intelligence behind many of which is developed by analysis of UAV surveillance footage. Google confirmed that software called TensorFlow was being used by the Pentagon for a pilot and said it had "long worked with government agencies to provide technology solutions". A Google spokesperson said: "The technology flags images for human review, and is for non-offensive uses only.

Google today said it is acquiring Kaggle, an online service that hosts data science and machine learning competitions, confirming what sources told us when we reported the acquisition yesterday. The company made the announcement at its Google Cloud Next conference this morning in San Francisco, while not disclosing the terms of the acquisition. But it's not all that surprising that Google would want to snap it up. With hundreds of thousands of data scientists on the platform, it would give Google the immediate ability to broaden its reach within the AI community. As it increasingly goes head-to-head with Amazon on the cloud computing front, it's going to need as much of an edge as it can get.