Google is biting off a big piece of device manufacturer HTC for $1.1 billion to expand its efforts to build phones, speakers, and other gadgets equipped with its arsenal of digital services.
It's buying the HTC engineering team that built the Pixel smartphone for Google in a cash deal, the companies said in a joint statement Thursday. Google is also getting a non-exclusive license for Taiwan-based HTC's intellectual property to help support Pixel phones.
The deal underscores how serious Google is becoming about designing its own family of devices to compete against Apple and Amazon in a high-stakes battle to become the technological hub of people's lives.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 05 2017, @07:33PM
Why can't new neighborhoods build a fiberoptic LAN for itself, and the multiple such neighborhoods could connect to each other via visible laser towers, etc., and then the same between nearby cities. The Web should probably be re-organized in the distributed way, too, with multiple copies of website data being pushed as close to users as possible.