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Shares in Alphabet Inc (Nasdaq: GOOG), the company better known as Google, are rising again in premarket trading today. The stock is currently up by more than 4% following yesterday’s rise of 6.2%. If those gains hold, Google could be set to become the worlds next company with a $4 trillion market cap today. Heres what you need to know. Why are GOOG shares rising? Shares in Alphabet have had a stellar run as of late. Yesterday, they rose more than 6.2%. Over the past five days, they have been up more than 11.5%. Over the past month, they have jumped more than 22%. And over the past six months, they have been up more than 87%. And thats before todays further 4% gain in premarket trading. So why is Alphabet’s share price jumping recently, particularly over the past week? Theres one big reason: artificial intelligence. But the companys boost from AI is the result of two different factors. The first: Last week, Google released Gemini 3, its proprietary AI chatbot and LLM. Industry watchers and consumers have widely praised the model for its speed, performance, and capabilities, which, in many tests, have outperformed OpenAIs ChatGPT-5. Gemini 3s capabilities and Googles decision to quickly integrate it into Search helped spur the stock higher last week. But that isnt the only AI boost Google that has gotten recently. On Monday, the Information reported that Facebook owner Meta is considering using Googles AI chips in its data centers in 2027a deal that could be worth billions to Google. Googles AI chips are the companys tensor processing units (TPUs). Googles TPUs have been around for nearly eight years now, but, as CNBC noted, the company has recently begun designing them to handle AI tasks with efficiency in mind. Meta is one of the largest buyers of components that go into AI infrastructure, and Nvidia is the leading provider in supplying AI chips. If Meta is considering opting for Googles TPUs over Nvidias AI chips, it suggests the company has confidence that Googles chips are more than suitable for powering its data centers. If thats the case, Google could be set to become a serious competitor to Nvidia in the AI hardware race. Indeed, Google investors seem to be celebrating that this morning. Fast Company reached out to Google and Meta for comment. Google could become the next $4 trillion company As of yesterdays market close, Alphabet had a market cap of roughly $3.84 trillion, making it the third-most valuable company after Nvidia and Apple, both of which are currently valued at more than $4 trillion. But already in premarket trading this morning, GOOG shares have risen by more than 4%. The companys share price needs to rise by just under 5% over yesterdays close to reach a market cap of $4 trillion. If it does that, Google would become just the fourth company to ever reach that milestone, following Nvidia, Microsoft, and Apple. (Microsofts valuation has currently sunk back below $4 trillion). Given that Googles stock price is already up around 4% in premarket this morning, it’s possible, but not guaranteed, that the search giant could cross the $4 trillion market cap before markets close today. Google is the best-performing Magnificent 7 stock of the year so far Google hasnt had just a great run as of late. When you look back at the companys stock price performance since 2025 began and compare it to the other companies in the Magnificent 7, Google is far and away the best-performing stock in the group so far this year. As of yesterdays closing price of $318.47 per share, GOOG shares were up over 87% since the year began. Heres how that compares to the other Magnificent 7 stocks: Alphabet Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG): up 87.79% year to date (YTD) NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA): up 35.94% YTD Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq: MSFT): up 12.46% YTD Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL): up 10.18% YTD Meta Platforms, Inc. (Nasdaq: META): up 4.70% YTD Tesla, Inc. (Nasdaq: TSLA): up 3.45% YTD Amazon.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN): up 3.14% YTD Investors will be keenly watching where Googles stock price goes from here. Its impossible to predict which direction that will be, but as of this writing, GOOG is so far the clear winner as far as stock price gains go among the Magnificent 7 in 2025.
Category:
E-Commerce
After entrepreneur Brynn Putnam sold her smart fitness company, Mirror, to Lululemon for $500 million in 2020, she was looking for her next big idea. It was the middle of the pandemic, and Putnam was living with five kids ranging in age from 2 to 21. She says she often found herself dreaming of an activity that would get her whole family to sit down and connect with each other. Brynn Putnam [Photo: Board] When we played games, we were either playing board games like Candyland, so that the littlest ones could participate, or we would try to play video games, but the teenagers who’ve logged a lot of hours on sort of modern controllers would always smoke us, Putnam says. There was a missing product: one that could give you the tactile feel of physical pieces and the face-to-face interaction of sitting around a shared experience, but with the interactivity of video games. Enter Board, Putnams newest venture. Board is a 24-inch game console that looks a bit like a gigantic iPad. Its function, though, is unlike pretty much any other device on the market: Board combines the setup and feel of a traditional board game with the digital screen of a video game, allowing players to use physical pieces on top of an interactive screen. [Image: Board] The console comes with 12 exclusive games and can accommodate up to 10 players in a team setting. It debuted on October 28 for a holiday price of $499, though its standard cost is $699. While the Board team wouldn’t share sales data, they did note that the product already surpassed initial forecasts. To make Boards premise work, Putnams team designed its own custom hardware and software that can identify different kinds of touch, withstand rough play and spills, and react in real time to players movements. For Putnam, Board represents an entirely new way to use tech; rather than isolating its users, Board is built to provide a social experience. [Photo: Board] How Board built a brand-new kind of game Creating Board started with one major hurdle, says Ryan Measel, the companys chief technology officer: Most touchscreens are only built to recognize 10 fingersand theyre certainly not designed to recognize objects. Board needed to identify not only an unlimited number of fingers, but also the consoles 49 unique game pieces. Measel explains that, with commercial platforms like Android and iOS, theres a programming layer that limits how many touch pointslike taps and swipesa developer can build into an application. With Board, Measels team built a custom driver that gave them full access to the consoles sensor array, opening up essentially endless possibilities for different interactions with the screen. [Photo: Board] Specifically, the Board screen is able to determine whats touching it (and how) through an embedded AI model thats been trained on the systems sensory outputs. It knows, for instance, how to distinguish between a hand accidentally brushing the board, a finger tapping the screen, and an arm passing over the board. It can also tell the difference between all 49 of the consoles game pieces using conductive traces, or unique patterns made out of a conductive material, that are etched onto the bottom of every piece. 30 fingers on the Board during the testing process. [Image: Board] Alongside the Boards unique ability to distinguish touch, Putnam says, a top concern was the consoles durabilityespecially given that some of its games are designed to be enjoyed by players as young as six. The device comes with a spill-resistant gasket around the display and a tight internal structure to keep it safe from liquids and bumps. My littlest one is 2, so she tends to use everything as a weapon, Putnam says. We have some great photos and videos from the testing process at the factory of te Board being submerged underwater, dropped from very high heights, and scratched multiple times. [Image: Board] How Board works When users receive their Board, the device comes with 12 games made specifically for the console, as well as unique pieces tailored to each game. Seth Sivak, Boards chief creative officer and former CEO of the game studio Proletariat, led game development. He says the consoles portfolio of games was carefully crafted specifically to offer something for all different kinds of players. [Photo: Board] The options run the gamut from 60-second-long arcade-inspired games to an escape room-themed experience that can take up to 90 minutes to complete. Even within the games themselves, players of different ages and skill levels can find roles appropriate to themlike in the chef-inspired game Chop Chop, where the kind of utensil game piece chosen by each participant determines their role in the kitchen. [Image: Board] The 2 year old can be the sponge and feel a lot of joy cleaning the kitchen, but it’s very simple and intuitive for them to do, Putnam says. The grown-up can be in charge of managing the order tickets as they come in and strategizing about how to navigate the changing kitchen layout, recipes, and tickets. I think thats really hard to dothere’s not a ton of experiences that really make sure everyone has a seat at the table. Right now, Sivak and his team are working to build out Boards IP into additional games. At the same time, Putnam says the company is working on making its software development kit available to external developers in order to bring existing games into the Board universe. [Photo: Board] Board is combining the old-school nostalgia of game night with all the advantages of digital gamingand it might just be a hit for everyone in the family. I think for a lot of parents, myself included, you don’t want to pretend like technology doesn’t exist, because technology makes things betterBoard does the rule maintenance for you, it does the score keeping, it does all these things, Putnam says. But you don’t want technology to remove social interaction. It’s important that the screen brings people together. It doesn’t replace your friends or your family, it doesn’t replace your teacher, but it helps make those experiences more rich.
Category:
E-Commerce
In his new book Ding Dong: How Ring Went from Shark Tank Reject to Everyones Front Door, Ring founder Jamie Siminoff pulls back the curtain on the chaotic, often absurd reality of building one of the most recognizable consumer tech brands of the last decade. The following excerpt captures one of the books most pivotal moments: the high-stakes, borderline-reckless gamble to secure the name Ring.com, a decision that nearly emptied the companys bank account, tested the patience of his investors, and set the stage for a brand that would soon reshape home security. eBay.com. Half.com. Cars.com. Shop.com. Toys.com. And yes, Nest.com. So many great four-letter domain names. And I wanted one: Ring.com. The owner of the URL was willing to part with it for 2 million bucks. That represented a massive chunk of the money my VCs were about to give me. Neither they, nor a couple of my seasoned tech friends who had experience with overpriced domain names, thought it was a great use of my new capital. Nor did the fellow who ran the mezcal company on the other side of the wall of our Santa Monica office. Youre going out of business! Your doorbell doesnt work! Its just a name! he yelled at me in the parking lot as I walked to my car one evening. On one hand, I wanted to yell back that he didnt know what he was talking about; on the other, I wondered if he was right and I was making a huge mistake. I also wondered where his anger at me was coming from, but realized hed probably heard some of my own raging through the walls. Youre going to spend all that money on a stupid name?! he barked.Another doubter wondered, Jamie, does it really have to be four letters? Whats so special about four letters? Yes, it had to be Ring. When Id come up with my voice message-to-email transcription service, I first called it Simulscribe, and it stagnated. When I changed the name to PhoneTag.com, we got a burst of interest. Names matter. I had once thought they shouldntall that mattered was having a quality product with an easy-to-understand benefit, a great customer experience, and a fair price. Turns out, the name matters. I would not make that mistake again with the doorbell. Soon enough, there would be lots of video-doorbell competitors whose products might be almost as good as ours when we launched F5. So the way to separate ourselves from the competition was brand. A mission as big as reducing crime in neighborhoods deserved a brand. That brand deserved a great name. For some totally unfathomable and fortunate reason, this URL owner showed zero curiosity about the individual or company that was trying to buy his name. In our exchanges, it seemed almost as if he was unfamiliar with the internet, which was particularly weird for someone who harvested domain names. I got the sense that for some time he had overplayed his hand, consistently valuing the URL higher than the market did. Which happens. Maybe he had tried to sell it during the dot-com boom for $10 million and it was worth only five then. Or maybe I was the one being played, and he knew exactly how much a perfect four-letter domain name could fetch, certainly way more than Id paid to own SlowDownAsshole.com ($15). My friend Diego Berdakina brilliant entrepreneur, USC professor, and the single smartest person I knowurged me, explicitly, to not pay a cent more than $100k for Ring.com. I explicitly did not tell him the owners starting price. First, I got the owner to knock the price down from $2 million to $1 million, but that was still an insane amount of up-front cash for a struggling startup to just light on fire, a full third of what I was getting from True Ventures. I had to figure a way to own the name without bankrupting our companywould the owner be interested in equity instead of cash? No. Wow. Clearly he hadnt read about Googles recent multibillion-dollar acquisition of Nest. I made one last offer for slightly under $1 million. Nope. One mill. We set a closing date. I forgot one thing, though. I didnt have the money. The morning of the closing, I called the owner. Listen, Im in the parking lot of my company and Im so embarrassed. The bad news is my board wont let me buy the name, full price today, for what I previously offered you. It was not a lie. I had a board. The only detail I left out was that the board was just me. Wow, said the owner. Thats a dirty thing your board did. Tell me about it. Worse than dirty. Disgusting. Im very upset. I hear you, brother. Me, too. I went on a bit. I doubled down about what a bunch of assholes my board were being. But the good news is Im authorized to deposit one hundred seventy-five thousand dollars in your account, todayI had $187,000 in the bank; the VC investments had not yet closedand the additional eight hundred twenty-five thousand paid in installments over two years, for a total of one million dollars. He lost his shit. He unleashed a string of four-letter words very different from Ring and eBay and Half. Effing this, mother-effing that. The connection dropped. Hed hung up. Damn, I thought. Had I overplayed my hand? Fifteen minutes later, I got an email from him. Wire the money. He included his bank information. He never asked who was on the board. Never asked what we did. I hope I would have, in his shoes. Maybe when youre offered a million bucks overall, with $175k coming that day, you just want to get it over with as quickly as possible. I called my friend Adam dAugellithe young VC at True who had been my biggest championto boast what a great deal I had cut, that Id essentially just saved us so much money. He wasnt quite ready for high-fives; their investment was about to close, and already a significant chunk of it was gone because I had a jones for a great four-letter domain name. Adam was fully Team Siminoff but, as Id done with others, I was not making it easy for him. Ring.com. What a great sound. As sweet as the three-toned jingle the doorbell made.
Category:
E-Commerce
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