Following years of tiptoeing around directly involving itself in blockchain projects, tech giant Google is finally looking to get its feet wet. The Alphabet subsidiary has appointed a new executive to lead a unit dedicated to “blockchain and other next-gen distributed computing and data storage technologies,” Bloomberg reported Wednesday. Shivakumar Venkataraman, Alphabet’s engineering vice president will now head the unit as the founding leader of Labs, an incubator created by Google to test new projects dedicated to virtual and augmented reality. Venkataraman, who has worked at Google for more than 18 years, brings ... (full story)