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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @09:57PM
People need to come up with alternative strategies to passing data around. There's got to be an alternative network that can established, based on different or existing technology, possibly routable via mesh-networking, etc.
Unless you put your minds to solving such issues, they won't ever get solved. Quit just saying "Oh, well! I guess we're at the mercy of the Corps!" Start putting your mind to the task.