In a move that seems to have surprised a lot of people, Google has just announced earlier today that they have agreed to sell off Motorola Mobility to the Chinese home based company Lenovo, for the price of $2.91 billion. Of course this was still at somewhat of a loss as Google purchased Motorola for $12.5 billion in 2012, but overall it will make for a better setup for everyone. Google gets to make a little money back off of its purchase of Motorola, Motorola gets to further its vision and goals of providing mobile internet to another 100 million people, and Lenovo gets a chance to get its foot in the door of the U.S. smartphone market, with Motorola as the brand now under their umbrella. What Google ended up keeping in the deal though, is most of Motorola’s patents, along with the Advanced Technology Division that is headed up by Regina Dugan.
Along with keeping the Advanced Technology Division, Google gets to keep whatever comes out of it, which includes things like the Ara modular phone concepts we’ve heard about in the past, as well as crazy ideas like tattoo passwords, and digestible sensors. Those last two definitely seem to be some of the weirdest ideas that we’ve heard of, but if you really think about the possibility of what sort of real world applications these ideas could have if ever implemented, they begin to make a little more sense. For those who are unaware of the Project Ara concepts, it’s basically an idea to create and produce a “modular” smartphone that lets the user essentially build up their device piece by piece, getting to choose things like the battery type all the way down to the processor and even display. Having this sort of design for a smartphone allows the user the ultimate in customization, and freely gives them more choice in what they want out of a device.
Google takes these ideas and others like an embedded neck tattoo used for purposes like lie detection, and houses them all under the “appropriately named” Google X division. The same division is where you’ll find plenty of Google’s other “weird science” like R&D going on, which makes the name of the division that much more fitting. Is anyone surprised that Google would keep the Advanced tech team for themselves?
Source: Tech Crunch