Google's still printing money, Kano's Harry Potter coding kit includes a real-life magic wand and Microsoft may be building a streaming-only Xbox. Here's your Daily Crunch for July 24, 2018. 1. Google joins the race to $1 trillion After its latest earnings report, Google's parent company Alphabet saw its share price jump an additional 5 percent, putting its valuation neck-and-neck with Amazon's. (As I write this on Tuesday morning, Google has a market cap of around $873 billion.) The company continues to print money off its ad business, even as its cost-per-click continues to decline. Meanwhile, its "other revenue," including revenue from Google Cloud, grew 37 percent year-over-year. 2. Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene: "We're playing the long game here" Speaking of Google's cloud business, TechCrunch's Frederic Lardinois sat down with the CEO of Google's cloud efforts, who said the company is definitely ready for large, enterprise customers. 3. Coding gets a real-life magic wand with Kano's Harry Potter kit The system is centered on a "build it yourself" wand utilizing an on-board gyroscope, accelerometer and magnetometer to interact with coding content on-screen. 4. Ebay to add support for Apple Pay, partners with Square Capital on seller financing Ebay announced that it will begin accepting Apple Pay on its marketplace starting this fall, and it's also teamed up with Square Capital on seller financing. 5. GM launches a peer-to-peer car sharing service This service is launching in Chicago, Detroit and Ann Arbor, allowing individual owners to rent out their GM-branded vehicles through its Maven car-sharing platform. 6. Microsoft is building low-cost, streaming-only Xbox, says report According to Thurrott.com the next Xbox will come in two flavors. One will be a traditional gaming console where games are processed locally. The other system will be a lower-powered system that will stream games from the cloud. 7. EU fines Asus, Denon & Marantz, Philips and Pioneer $130M for online price-fixing EU antitrust authorities say the four companies engaged in so-called "fixed or minimum resale price maintenance" by restricting the ability of online retailers to set their own prices for widely used consumer electronics products. |