Google Hangouts has had a more material design update recently which has been followed up by the announcement of dedicated web portal for the chat, voice and video chat app by Google.

Hangouts which was previously available as a native Android or iOS app, a chrome app & extension and also accessible inside Gmail and Inbox will now also be accessible at hangouts.google.com. The dedicated website removes the clutter involved with having to access hangouts from another service and it looks rather beautiful with a randomly changing background image but the beauty fades away when you tap a chat.

The chat popup doesn’t follow material design guidelines and it kills the impression you get at first sight. The number of chats you can have open at once really depends on how wide your monitor is and majority seem to have the ability to open up to 3 chat simultaneously.

Well if you are the kind that wants to use hangouts for plain charting without installing an extension or getting distractions then you will definitely love this.

Google Founder and former CEO Larry Page just dropped a major announcement which that Google the multi-venturous company will now be called Alphabet. (abc.xyz) as an umbrella company for Google and its Google-owned sub companies. Larry Page and Sergey, the founders of Google also announced Sundar Pichai as the CEO of Google.

Alphabet will be the parent company of the ‘new Google’ together with other businesses that previously operated under Google will have their own CEO with Google having Sundar Puchai and Alphabet will have Larry and Sergey at the top still managing the resource allocation and compensations for the various CEOs.

Some of the divisions that will be separated from the old Google include X labs, Google Ventures, YouTube and Google Life Sciences. The new Google will maintain what we have known to be Google’s core businesses such as Search, Android, ads etc.

Alphabet’s stock will still be traded on Nasdaq under the GOOG and GOOGL symbols and Google’s stock will be transformed one-to-one into shares of Alphabet. And Google will report quarterly results separately from other Alphabet companies.

All this comes after an open letter penned by Larry Page which states that “Google is not a conventional company. We do not intend to become one.” As part of that, we also said that you could expect us to make “smaller bets in areas that might seem very speculative or even strange when compared to our current businesses.”

You can read the rest of the letter on the Alphabet website.