Source: between Q1 2019 and this fall, Alphabet’s Google Cloud, hardware unit, and YouTube have roughly doubled headcount, as the total employee count grew ~80% (Jon Victor/The Information)

Jon Fingas / Engadget:
What to expect from Google’s “Made by Google” event: Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro, Pixel Watch, and potentially Pixel device previews and Nest hardware  —  – Wildcards: More Pixel device previews and Nest hardware  —  Google’s fall hardware event promises to be special this year.

Matt Day / Bloomberg:
Amazon’s AWS unit expects to add employees in 2023 and will continue building data centers, despite the company’s hiring freeze and cuts in other divisions  —  Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud unit plans to add employees next year and keep building new data centers, a sign that a hiring freeze elsewhere …

Todd Spangler / Variety:
YouTube’s Q3 ad revenue dropped 1.9% YoY to $7.07B, below expectations of $7.42B and marking YouTube’s slowest ad growth in at least two years  —  Overall, Alphabet, Google’s parent company, also came in below analyst estimates.  The company posted revenue of $69.1 billion and earnings per share of $1.06 for Q3.

Paul Sawers / TechCrunch:
Stockholm-based Mavenoid, which offers human- and AI-enabled product support and troubleshooting tools for hardware companies, has raised a $30M Series B  —  Mavenoid, a Swedish company that provides both human- and AI-enabled support and troubleshooting tools for hardware companies …

Francois Murphy / Reuters:
Austrian police say a hacker, arrested in November, tried to sell the name, gender, address, and DOB of “presumably every citizen” in Austria, or 9.1M people  —  A Dutch hacker arrested in November obtained and offered for sale the full name, address and date of birth …

Jem Aswad / Variety:
YouTube says Music and Premium together have 80M+ paying subscribers, up from 50M in September 2021, and payments to creators and others reached $50B since 2019  —  It’s a dramatic leap, especially for a platform where so much can be had for free, and would seem to place YouTube …