Google purchases HTC's Pixel division

Google's new venture into the smartphone arena will be with Taiwan's HTC Corp. The tech giant agreed to pay $1.1 billion for HTC, which develops their Pixel smartphones. Google will gain 2,000 HTC employees and both parties agreed to look at other areas of collaboration in the future. Pixel phones were introduced one year ago and have less than 1 percent market share globally with an estimated 2.8 million shipments, according to research firm IDC.