Immersive view now in Maps — plus more updates

Google Maps helps over one billion people navigate and explore. And over the past few years, our investments in AI have supercharged the ability to bring you the most helpful information about the real world, including when a business is open and how crowded your bus is. Today at Google I/O, we announced new ways the latest advancements in AI are transforming Google Maps — helping you explore with an all-new immersive view of the world, find the most fuel-efficient route, and use the magic of Live View in your favorite third-party apps. A more immersive, intuitive map Google Maps first launched to help people navigate to their destinations. Since then, it’s evolved to become much more — it’s a…

Improving skin tone representation across Google

Seeing yourself reflected in the world around you — in real life, media or online — is so important. And we know that challenges with image-based technologies and representation on the web have historically left people of color feeling overlooked and misrepresented. Last year, we announced Real Tone for Pixel, which is just one example of our efforts to improve representation of diverse skin tones across Google products. Today, we’re introducing a next step in our commitment to image equity and improving representation across our products. In partnership with Harvard professor and sociologist Dr. Ellis Monk, we’re releasing a new skin tone scale designed to be more inclusive of the spectrum of skin tones we see in our society. Dr.…

Amazon EC2 Now Supports NitroTPM and UEFI Secure Boot

In computing, Trusted Platform Module (TPM) technology is designed to provide hardware-based, security-related functions. A TPM chip is a secure crypto-processor that is designed to carry out cryptographic operations. There are three key advantages of using TPM technology. First, you can generate, store, and control access to encryption keys outside of the operating system. Second, you can use a TPM module to perform platform device authentication by using the TPM’s unique RSA key, which is burned into it. And third, it may help to ensure platform integrity by taking and storing security measurements. During re:Invent 2021, we announced the future availability of NitroTPM, a virtual TPM 2.0-compliant TPM module for your Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) instances, based on…

AWS Week in Review – May 9, 2022

This post is part of our Week in Review series. Check back each week for a quick roundup of interesting news and announcements from AWS! Another week starts, and here’s a collection of the most significant AWS news from the previous seven days. This week is also the one-year anniversary of CloudFront Functions. It’s exciting to see what customers have built during this first year. Last Week’s Launches Here are some launches that caught my attention last week: Amazon RDS supports PostgreSQL 14 with three levels of cascaded read replicas – That’s 5 replicas per instance, supporting a maximum of 155 read replicas per source instance with up to 30X more read capacity. You can now build a more robust…