Alphabet Inc.
Alphabet Inc. is an American multinational technology conglomerate holding company headquartered in Mountain View, California. Alphabet is the world's second-largest technology company by revenue and one of the world's most valuable companies. It was created through a restructuring of Google on October 2, 2015, and became the parent company of Google and several former Google subsidiaries. It is considered one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Amazon, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft.
Some of the key events about Alphabet Inc.
- 2010Google's Street View cars collected private Wi-Fi data without consent
- 2012Google agreed to pay $22.5 million to settle FTC charges over privacy violations
- 2013Revelation of Google's involvement in PRISM surveillance program
- 2015Restructured Google into Alphabet Inc. as a holding company to improve management of diverse businesses
- 2015European Union filed antitrust charges against Google for favoring its own shopping service
- 2016Launched Waymo as a separate company to develop self-driving technology
- 2017Google AI created AlphaGo Zero, which mastered the game of Go without human knowledge
- 2017Google was fined €2.4 billion by EU for manipulating search results
- 2018Introduced Google Duplex, an AI system capable of conducting natural conversations to complete real-world tasks
- 2018Google faced criticism for Project Dragonfly, a censored search engine for China
- 2018Google+ shut down after a data breach affecting up to 500,000 users was revealed
- 2019Achieved quantum supremacy with the Sycamore processor, performing a calculation in 200 seconds that would take a supercomputer 10,000 years
- 2019Google was fined €1.5 billion by EU for antitrust violations in online advertising
- 2020DeepMind's AlphaFold system made a major breakthrough in protein folding prediction
- 2020Committed $1 billion in grants to support digital transformation in Africa
- 2020U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Google for monopolistic practices
- 2021Announced a $7 billion investment to expand offices and data centers across the United States
- 2021Google faced a $5 billion lawsuit for tracking users in 'private' browsing mode
- 2022Launched the Google Cybersecurity Action Team to support the security and digital transformation of governments and businesses
- 2023Introduced Bard, an experimental conversational AI service powered by LaMDA
Disclaimer: This material is written based on information taken from open sources, including Wikipedia, news media, podcasts, and other public sources.