Gadgetory

today's tech news is brought to you by the letters WT & F I'm Bridget Carey this is your cnet update Google is now the company alphabet which is the parent company of Google in a strange and unexpected move Google just renamed and reorganized itself to better separate the big wild idea projects like robots and self-driving cars from the core Google consumer products like search youtube and android the bottom line is that this doesn't change what Google does rather it just changes how it's all labeled for investors here's a quick breakdown of Google's new alphabet soup larry page and sergey brin the cofounders of google are now in charge of alphabet it's a holding company page is CEO Brenda's president Google sits under the alphabet umbrella sundar pichai who was in charge of Google products now gets a new snazzy title he's CEO of Google he oversees all the googly stuff Maps YouTube Chrome Android and all the other stuff like the ambitious future tech projects are being moved aside into their own separate companies and those people in charge also will likely get nice big CEO titles so what are some of those other divisions that spawn from google you have life science projects like the glucose sensing contact lenses in calico the california life company which does anti aging research there's the X lab that works on Google glass and self-driving cars and delivery drones and the project loon internet balloons sidewalk labs aims to fix city infrastructure there's all the robot research being done with Boston Dynamics and the investment arms the Google capital and google ventures are separated under this alphabet umbrella of companies the Google Fiber high-speed internet service is another thing maybe the new self service project 5 will be managed with that and there's nest the maker of smart home gadgets like the nest thermostat and the nest cam the exact corporate structure will be revealed in a few weeks the URL for this new company alphabet is ABC XYZ it's clever but that's also because alphabet tom was taken by the car company BMW and the twitter name alphabet is already owned by a man in Ohio but Google is not the only company that knows how to have a little fun with letters in the URL if you go to ABC WTF it redirects to Microsoft's Bing nice little zing for Bing that's it for this tech news update there's more to dive into its cnet com from our studios in New York I'm Bridget Carey