Alphabet

Alphabet's Project X drones started delivering burritos to customers in Australia's Capital Territory last year, and has now announced that folks in Finland can look forward to package deliveries by air from early 2019.​

Waymo has covered some serious miles in testing its autonomous vehicles on public roads, five million (8 million km) of them in fact. To go with the milestone, the self-driving company has shared a 360-degree video that demonstrates how its vehicles see the world, and takes you along for the ride.

There are various driverless car trials taking place around the world, but these invariably involve a human at the wheel ready to take control in case of emergency. Google spin-off Waymo is moving into the next phase of testing, setting its driverless cars free on the roads of Phoenix.

​​Project Loon is an audacious concept dreamt up in Google's secretive X lab to connect remote regions of the world through high-flying communications balloons. Now headed up by Google's parent company, Alphabet, the balloons have been green-lighted to take flight over Puerto Rico.

Google’s parent company, Alphabet, has now spawned Dandelion, a new startup that aims to tap into geothermal energy. The company’s signature technology is a geothermal heating and cooling system that pumps heat from the ground into the home in winter, or out of it during summer.

Google's self-driving cars have logged more than 2 million miles over the last seven years. Now the project has entered a new phase with the announcement that the self-driving car venture has been spun off into Waymo, a new company that aims to commercialize the technology more widely.

There's still some way to go before US laws allow the kind of delivery service Amazon imagines, but a new initiative from the federal government is promising to speed things up and allow Google to test its delivery drones in the US.