Learn the ABCs of Google's Alphabet

Today's Tech news is brought to you by the letters W T and F. I'm Bridget Carey this is your CNet Update. Google is now the company Alphabet, which is the parent company of Google. In a strange and unexpected move, Google just renamed and reorganized itself to better separate the big wild idea projects like robots and self driving cars, from the core Google consumer products like Search, YouTube, and Android. The bottom line is that this doesn't change what Google does, Rather it just changes how it's all labeled for investors. Here's a quick breakdown of Google's new Alphabet soup. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google are now in charge of Alphabet. It's a holding company. Page is CEO, Brin is President. Google sits under the Alphabet umbrella Sundar Pichai, who was in charge of Google Products now gets a new snazzy title. He's CEO of Google. He oversees all the Googley stuff: Maps, YouTube, Chrome, Android, and all the other stuff like the ambitious future tech projects are being moved aside into their own separate companies. And those people in charge also will likely get nice big CEO titles. So what are some of those other divisions that spawned from Google? You have life science projects like the glucose sensing contact lenses in Calico. The California Life Company which does anti-aging research. There's the X lab which works on Google glasses and self-driving cars and delivery drones and the Project Loon internet balloons. Sidewalk Labs aims to fix city infrastructure. There's all the robot research being done with Boston Dynamics. And that's been armed. The Google capital and Google ventures are separated under this alphabet of companies. The Google fiber high speed internet service is another thing. Maybe the new cell service five will be managed with that. And there's nest, the maker of smart home gadgets like the nest thermostat and the nest cam. The exact corporate structure will be revealed in a few weeks. The url for this new company alphabet is abc.xyz. It's clever but that's also because alphabet.com was taken by the car company BMW. And the Twitter name alphabet is owned by a man in Ohio. Well they're not the only company that knows how to have fun with letters in the US. If you go to ABC. WTF, it redirects to Microsoft Bing, a nice little zing for Bing. That's it for this tech news update, there's more to dive into at cnet.com. From our studios in New York, I'm Bridget Carey. [SOUND]