Rick Osterloh | |
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Alma mater | Stanford University |
Occupation | Senior Vice President of Devices & Services at Google |
Rick Osterloh is an American executive and the Senior Vice President of Devices & Services at Google. He manages the business units responsible for developing Pixel, Google Nest, and Fitbit devices. [1] [2] Osterloh's professional journey includes roles such as the President of Motorola Mobility and Vice President of Product and Design at Skype. [3] Furthermore, he serves on the Board of Directors of First Republic Bank. [4]
Rick Osterloh earned bachelor's and master's degrees in industrial engineering and completed an MBA at Stanford University. [5]
His career commenced at Amazon.com as a product manager, following which he contributed to product development and strategy at Good Technology, a mobile security company. [6] Osterloh later transitioned to Skype and led the software and hardware product development. [5] In 2012, he joined Motorola Mobility and held various positions, culminating in his role as President, overseeing the design, engineering, and marketing of smartphones, tablets, and wearables. [7] His return to Google in 2016 marked the establishment of a new hardware division unifying various projects, including Chromebook, Chromecast, Google Home, and Google Pixel. [8] He supervised the acquisition of HTC's smartphone design team in 2017, [9] and the acquisition of Fitbit in 2020. [10]
Osterloh played a significant role in the development and launch of various Google products, including the Pixel 2, Pixel 3, Pixel 4, Pixel 5, Pixel 6, Pixelbook, Pixel Slate, Pixelbook Go, Nest Hub, Nest Hub Max, Nest Mini, Nest Audio, Nest Wifi, Nest Thermostat, Nest Hello, Nest Cam, Nest Protect, Nest Secure, Stadia, and Pixel Buds. [11]
Motorola Mobility LLC, marketed as Motorola, is an American consumer electronics manufacturer primarily producing smartphones and other mobile devices running Android. Headquartered at Merchandise Mart in Chicago, Illinois, it is a subsidiary of the Chinese multinational technology company Lenovo.
Google Store is a hardware retail store operated by Google that sells Google Pixel devices, Google Nest products, Chromecast dongles, Fitbit devices, and accessories such as earbuds, phone cases, chargers, and keyboards. It also sold Nexus, Daydream, Stadia and Cardboard devices until their discontinuations. Google Store sells products made by Google or made in collaboration with that company. It was introduced on March 11, 2015, and replaced the Devices section of Google Play as Google's hardware retailer. It is overseen by Ana Corrales, who is also the COO of Google's Devices & Services division.
Google I/O, or simply I/O, is an annual developer conference held by Google in Mountain View, California. The name "I/O" is taken from the number googol, with the "I" representing the "1" in googol and the "O" representing the first "0" in the number. The format of the event is similar to Google Developer Day.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to Google:
Lenovo smartphones are marketed as the "LePhone" in Mainland China and the "IdeaPhone" overseas. Motorola Mobility, ZUK Mobile and Medion, divisions of Lenovo, sell smartphones under their own brands. On April 27, 2017, Lenovo announced that the ZUK brand would cease operations. As of September 2015, Lenovo is in the process of rebranding most of its phones using the Motorola brand name.
Google Pixel is a brand of portable consumer electronic devices developed by Google that run either ChromeOS or the Android operating system. The main line of Pixel products consist of Android-powered smartphones, which have been produced since October 2016 as the replacement of the older Nexus, and of which the Pixel 8 and 8 Pro are the current models. The Pixel brand also includes laptop and tablet computers, as well as several accessories, and was originally introduced in February 2013 with the Chromebook Pixel.
Moto X is an Android smartphone developed and manufactured by Motorola Mobility, and released in August 2013.
Project Ara was a modular smartphone project under development by Google. The project was originally headed by the Advanced Technology and Projects team within Motorola Mobility while it was a Google subsidiary. Google retained the ATAP group when selling Motorola Mobility to Lenovo, and it was placed under the stewardship of the Android development staff; Ara was later split off as an independent operation. Google stated that Project Ara was being designed to be utilized by "6 billion people": 1 billion current smartphone users, and 5 billion feature phone users.
Wear OS is a version of Google's Android operating system designed for smartwatches and other wearables. By pairing with mobile phones running Android version 6.0 "Marshmallow" or newer, or iOS version 10.0 or newer with limited support from Google's pairing application, Wear OS integrates Google Assistant technology and mobile notifications into a smartwatch form factor.
Android One is a family of third-party Android smartphones promoted by Google. In comparison to many third-party Android devices, which ship with a manufacturer's customized user interface and bundled apps, these devices run near-stock versions of Android with limited modifications, and a focus on Google services. Devices that run Android One receive OS updates for at least two years after their release, and security patches for at least three years.
Google's Advanced Technology and Projects group (ATAP) is a skunkworks team and in-house technology incubator, created by former DARPA director Regina Dugan. ATAP is similar to X, but works on projects, granting project leaders time—previously only two years—in which to move a project from concept to proven product. According to Dugan, the ideal ATAP project combines technology and science, requires a certain amount of novel research, and creates a marketable product. Historically, the ATAP team was born at Motorola Mobility and kept when Google sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo in 2014; for this reason, ATAP ideas have tended to involve mobile hardware technology.
Fuchsia is an open-source capability-based operating system developed by Google. In contrast to Google's Linux-based operating systems such as ChromeOS and Android, Fuchsia is based on a custom kernel named Zircon. It publicly debuted as a self-hosted git repository in August 2016 without any official corporate announcement. After years of development, its official product launch was in 2021 on the first-generation Google Nest Hub, replacing its original Linux-based Cast OS.
The Pixel and Pixel XL are a pair of Android smartphones designed, developed, and marketed by Google as part of the Google Pixel product line, succeeding the Nexus line of smartphones. They were officially announced on October 4, 2016 at the Made by Google event and released in the United States on October 20. On October 4, 2017, they were succeeded by the Pixel 2 and Pixel 2 XL.
The HTC U11 is an Android smartphone manufactured and sold by HTC as part of the HTC U series. It was announced on 16 May 2017 and succeeds the HTC 10 smartphone. In the United States, the HTC U11's major carrier is Sprint; however, it is also compatible with unlocked carriers, such as AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon.
The Pixelbook is a portable laptop/tablet hybrid computer developed by Google which runs ChromeOS. It was announced on October 4, 2017, and was released on October 30. In September 2022, Google canceled future generations of the product and dissolved the team working on it.
Google Tensor is a series of ARM64-based system-on-chip (SoC) processors designed by Google for its Pixel devices. It was originally conceptualized in 2016, following the introduction of the first Pixel smartphone, though actual developmental work did not become in full swing until 2020. The first-generation Tensor chip debuted on the Pixel 6 smartphone series in 2021, and were succeeded by the Tensor G2 chip in 2022 and G3 in 2023. Tensor has been generally well received by critics.
The Pixel Watch is a Wear OS smartwatch designed, developed, and marketed by Google as part of the Google Pixel product line. First previewed in May 2022 during the Google I/O keynote, it features a round dome-shaped display as well as heavy integration with Fitbit, which Google acquired in 2021. Two Pixel-branded smartwatches had been in development at Google by July 2016, but they were canceled ahead of their release due to hardware chief Rick Osterloh's concerns that they did not fit well with other Pixel devices. Development on a new Pixel-branded watch began shortly after Google's acquisition of Fitbit.
The Pixel Tablet is an Android tablet designed, developed, and marketed by Google as part of the Google Pixel product line. It was previewed at the Google I/O keynote in May 2022, and was finally revealed in May 2023. It was released June 2023.