Google’s I/O developer conference is over, and we’ve learned quite a bit: Devs just can’t get enough of Google Glass, design is a bigger focus for the company than ever before, and Larry Page is kind of sad about a lot of things. It’s been a whirlwind ride, but honestly we’re just glad to be out of San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

Check out our highlights from I/O below:

• Google I/O 2013 keynote live blog
• Larry Page is sad, hopeful, and frustrated in his heartfelt Google I/O speech
• Google Glass apps are easy to develop, but brutally difficult to design well
• What hardware is Google making after Glass? Mary Lou Jepsen knows
• What’s next for Google Glass: More units, more apps, more colors
• How cognitive science and user empathy powered Google’s design breakthrough
• OK, Google, your conversational search is awesome as hell
• Maps rebuilt from the ‘ground up,’ iPad version coming this fall
• Google Play for Education could kill the iPad in schools
• Major design overhaul makes Google+ look a whole lot like Pinterest
• Google announces its Spotify competitor, Google Play Music ‘All Access’ — ‘radio without rules’
• Hangouts, the best part of Google+, gets standalone iOS, Android, and Chro

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Google has gone from a company that approached design through cold, hard data to one that’s employing gorgeous, user-centric interfaces.

Design was a big theme at this year’s Google I/O developer conference, with over a dozen sessions exploring design in some fashion. And you can see Google’s new aesthetic focus in plenty of its products — like Gmail’s slight redesign and the upcoming Google Maps refresh — but Android serves as the fastest example of Google’s design turnaround.

Perhaps it’s because design matters all the more on a small smartphone screen. With Android, Google also had to do something about Apple’s head start with iOS. To get Android to look as good at the iPhone, Google had to radically reshape how it thought of design, and fast. Android 4.0 “Ice Cream Sandwich,” released in 2011, was Google’s first attempt to emphasize design in its mobile OS. Its aesthetic has only become more refined since then.

Google being Google, it’s also obsessively focused on the function of its design. Unlike of the old days, where Google went with the design most people liked through rigorous testing, usability is front and center now, with a new focus on cognitive science and user empathy.

Designing to delight on Android

Users brought up a slew of design issues in Android’s first few versions, and Google saw the need for a new direction. Enter Android’s new design principles, co-authored by Google’s Rachel Garb, head of interaction design for Android apps, and Helena Roeber, who previously headed up Android’s user experience research team.

“We thought, what if we turned this long list of shortcomings that bum us out into something that actually inspires us to create beautiful and usable designs,” Garb said during a Google I/O panel yesterday.

Enchant. Simplify. Amaze. With Android 4.0 two years ago, those three seemingly simple principles became the cornerstone of Android’s design.

“We all respond emotionally to every moment we experience, and we experience around 20,000 of these moments every waking day,” Garb said. Negative emotions are so powerful they have the ability to shorten your lifespan, while positive emotions are essential for daily life.

Garb’s goal: to make sure Android serves as a fount of positive experiences. That was a big departure from Android’s earlier days, when it was complicated, technical, and far from user friendly.

As one example, Google developed a subtle animation in the Android home screen to tell users when they’ve reached the end of their available screens. If there was no indication, users could get frustrated. The new animation delighted users so much that they ended up playing around with it just for fun.

“Not only did it tell them they did everything right, it also kind of helped establish the virtual spaces and provided the feedback in an elegant, subtle, and non-disruptive way,” Roeber said.

Google also added a full-time writer to the design team to take charge of all of the user-viewable text in Android. With short words, active verbs, and common nouns, the writer helped transform Android into an environment more suited for typical, non-technical users.

For example, a setting that used to read “Use tactile feedback” was changed to the more human-readable “Vibrate on touch.” Similarly, a warning that used to read “You didn’t insert a SIM card” now simply prompts “Insert SIM card now.”

You can see all the new design principles at work in Google Now, Android’s predictive search virtual assistant. Enabling it simply takes one click on your Android phone (Simplify), and afterwards it simply presents relevant information when you need it (Enchant). Its interface is sparse, consisting of only the cards you need to see at any particular time. Google Now also learns from your behavior to get better over time (Amaze).

Better design through science

“All of our evolution has been optimized for the types of things we’re likely to see,” said Alex Faaborg, a Google designer with a background in cognitive science and machine learning. Speaking at an I/O panel focused on cognitive science and design, he discussed a few examples of how tiny decisions take advantage of human perception to create a better user experience.

Gestalt psychology principles play a significant role in Google’s designs. For example, Google is using white space more liberally across its products to group items (consider that bit of space between Google search results). In Android, it’s taking advantage of our ability to automatically complete shapes for things like form entries (boring rectangular boxes are out, now you just see the bottom portion of a text entry line). Similar objects, like the stars and check boxes in Gmail, are grouped together to make them easier for us to scan.

Even those small notifications you get in Google Docs along the side of the edges of your screen are backed by cognitive science. Faaborg pointed out that we see peripheral motion faster than what we’re looking at directly, so it makes sense to keep your notifications along the edges of the screen.

About half of Faaborg’s talk focused on vision, while the other half focused on attention, focus, and memory. Google learned that repetition may be a better way to teach simple concepts to users, instead of just offering a single tutorial up front. For example, a repeated alert in new Android phones tells users where they can find all of their apps. Previously, users would skip through the short introductory screen.

“Consistency is not critical — you don’t need to build products identical to what’s on the marketplace,” Faaborg noted at the end of his chat, in a takeaway that also tells us a lot about how Google views design now. He urged developers to build innovative designs and trust that their audiences will be able to understand them. “People are smart,” he said.

Is it enough?

While Google’s design breakthroughs have led to some major changes internally, its competition hasn’t been sitting still.

Apple, a company practically synonymous with excellent product design, will likely see a major style evolution now that Jony Ive is in charge of design company-wide. According to rumors, this year’s iOS 7 could be a major overhaul more in line with Ive’s aesthetic (a love of simple and flat designs).

With Windows 8, Microsoft made a radical design shift as well, bringing elements from its slick Windows Phone operating system to the desktop. Microsoft just announced that it sold 100 million Windows 8 licenses in its first six months on the market, which is in line with Windows 7 sales. With its support for tablets and traditional computers, Windows 8′s design could continue to pay off for Microsoft as personal computing trends change over the next few years.

No matter what Google does, it can’t please everyone. But now, at least, Google is trying.

Photos: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat: Top image: Google

Talk about eating your own dogfood. While most businesses are still figuring out a way to use Google+, the search giant’s 50,000-plus employees are, unsurprisingly, making it an essential part of their workflow.

One example: Google employees participate in around 20,000 Hangouts a day internally, according to Chee Chew, Google’s vice president of engineering for real time communication in Google+.

Speaking at a Google I/O fireside chat this morning, Chew was responding to an audience member who asked if Google has figured out how to pitch Google+ to businesses (the implication being that businesses still aren’t clear on its utility). While Chew was quick to talk about how Google itself is using Google+, he didn’t directly answer the audience member’s question.

Hangouts’ 10-person group video chat ability is among the most compelling features in Google+ — so much so that Google is breaking out Hangouts as its new unified messaging platform.

Another panelist noted that Google itself is probably the single biggest user of Google Apps, which includes all of the company’s other services, as well as Google+.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

After raising more than $10 million on Kickstarter, smartwatch maker Pebble announced today that it has received $15 million in first round funding from Charles River Ventures.

That’s a pretty hefty sum for a company that was initially shot down by VCs, a blow that led to the Kickstarter campaign, one of the first big crowdfunding success stories. But after nabbing around 85,000 orders on Kickstarter and successfully kicking off Pebble shipments (despite significant delays), it’s not surprising to see investors taking a second look.

Pebble says the funding will let it expand its software engineering team, scale for demand, and grow its open development platform. (I backed Pebble via Kickstarter and am still waiting for my watch.)

Pebble could be credited with kicking off the latest smartwatch craze — now Apple, Google, and several other companies are rumored to be working on similar devices. The Pebble communicates with your smartphone to show incoming calls, email messages, and calendar entries, and it can also run apps on its own. After launching its initial SDK for developers in March, the company is today releasing an updated SDK that allows for two-way communication between your smartwatch and smartphone. That means Pebble apps can now be built to remotely control your smartphones or other web-connected devices.

The company is also launching a Sports API for fitness apps, which would give developers the ability to connect their apps with the smartwatch similar to RunKeeper’s integration a few weeks ago.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

ShopSavvy’s new look is paying off in a big way.

The company officially launched a redesigned version of its mobile shopping app for iOS today, which also incorporates new product discovery features for the first time (previously, you’d have to know exactly what you’re looking for in its apps). The new app not only looks better — it’s also led to a significant increase in user engagement among early testers, ShopSavvy revealed to us.

The amount of lists people created within ShopSavvy increased by 291 percent, while the products added to those lists grew by 555 percent. Additionally, the company said that daily sessions increased by 26 percent, and acccount creation has jumped by 44 percent.

“We have a lot of users who really wanted a discovery experience as well,” said ShopSavvy cofounder and CEO John Boyd. “The challenge was coming up with an experience that works for discovery as well as direct search.”

Previously, ShopSavvy looked like a typical price comparison application. Now it’s an intriguing blend of comparison and product browsing. There’s a new menu on the left that suggests products that you may like, and you can easily drag products into your lists and bookmarks. Doing just about anything in the new app feels effortless — so those new engagement figures make sense.

ShopSavvy first dabbled in product discovery when it launched an iPad app last December. Clearly, the company’s experience building that app has informed the redesigned iPhone experience.

Another big addition to the new ShopSavvy app is the ability to list products that don’t have UPC tags. This will allow the company to offer price comparison for a wider variety of products, and it could also be useful for local merchants, Boyd tells me.

ShopSavvy has offices in San Francisco and Dallas and has thus far raised a total of $11.5 million.

Google I/O 2013, the company’s annual developer conference, will kick off soon with a massive 3-hour keynote. We’re on the scene and ready to liveblog the heck out of this thing.

News announced so far:

• Larry Page is sad, hopeful, and frustrated in his heartfelt Google I/O speech
• OK, Google, your conversational search is awesome as hell
• Maps rebuilt from the ‘ground up,’ iPad version coming this fall
• Google Play for Education could kill the iPad in schools
• Major design overhaul makes Google+ look a whole lot like Pinterest
• Hangouts, the best part of Google+, gets standalone iOS, Android, and Chrome apps
• Google Glass is for dorks — and for doctors
• Google Glass gets first news app for the ‘connected generation’
• Google gives mobile developers some massive love with 5 new money-making features
• Google’s latest Nexus phone is an unlocked Samsung Galaxy S4 with pure Android
• Google Chrome reaches milestone of 750M montly active users
• Google announces its Spotify competitor, Google Play Music ‘All Access’ — ‘radio without rules’
• Google releases location APIs that may hugely help fitness apps
• Google Play game services is a Xbox Live-like mobile network — and offers cross-platform gaming
• Google Play has 48B app installs, 2.5B in the last month alone
• 900M Android activations to date, Google says

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Can’t make it to Google I/O? You can still watch the festivities from Google’s massive developer conference via livestream.

Check out our Google I/O keynote liveblog here.

Google will stream the biggest sessions — including today’s 3-hour long keynote — for the world to see. Today’s stream will start at 9 a.m. Pacific, starting with the keynote.

News announced so far:

• Larry Page is sad, hopeful, and frustrated in his heartfelt Google I/O speech
• Check out Google’s new Star Trek-like voice search (video)
• OK, Google, your conversational search is awesome as hell
• Maps rebuilt from the ‘ground up,’ iPad version coming this fall
• Google Play for Education could kill the iPad in schools
• Major design overhaul makes Google+ look a whole lot like Pinterest
• Hangouts, the best part of Google+, gets standalone iOS, Android, and Chrome apps
• Google Glass is for dorks — and for doctors
• Google Glass gets first news app for the ‘connected generation’
• Google gives mobile developers some massive love with 5 new money-making features
• Google’s latest Nexus phone is an unlocked Samsung Galaxy S4 with pure Android
• Google Chrome reaches milestone of 750M montly active users
• Google announces its Spotify competitor, Google Play Music ‘All Access’ — ‘radio without rules’
• Google releases location APIs that may hugely help fitness apps
• Google Play game services is a Xbox Live-like mobile network — and offers cross-platform gaming
• Google Play has 48B app installs, 2.5B in the last month alone
• 900M Android activations to date, Google says

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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If you’re looking forward to tons of new gadgets and big product news at this year’s Google I/O developer conference, you may have to adjust your expectations. But that could actually end up being a very good thing for Google.

The company’s new Android head, Sundar Pichai, said in an interview with Wired yesterday that there won’t be many new products shown off at I/O. That means no new version of the Android OS, and no new gadgets like the failed Nexus Q.

“Both on Android and Chrome, we’re going to focus this I/O on all of the kinds of things we’re doing for developers, so that they can write better things,” he said. “We will show how Google services are doing amazing things on top of these two platforms.”

While it may be disappointing for some, the focus away from big product blowouts at I/O may actually be better for Google in the long run.

If anything, last year’s blockbuster I/O showing was an anomaly for Google — and when it came to setting expectations for future events, it probably hurt the company more than it helped. While that insane live Google Glass skydive was indeed amazing, the company also wasted plenty of time, energy, and goodwill on the Nexus Q, a baffling product that Google (wisely) never released.

Ultimately, it felt like Google was trying desperately to out-Apple Apple with last year’s keynote. Perhaps this year, it won’t feel the need to try so darn hard.

There’s plenty of time for Google to host big media events. At I/O, the company would be better off selling the gospel of its services to the thousands of excited developers in attendance. In particular, Google needs to convince developers to prioritize Android more (most devs focus on iOS apps first) and to build more Google+ apps.

Apple may be taking a similar approach this year with its own developer conference (which sold out in just two minutes). Apple CEO Tim Cook noted that there won’t be any new hardware announcements at WWDC this year.

Here are a few things we expect to see at I/O this year, as well as several things we predict won’t show up.

More about Android’s future

Sundar Pichai got everyone thinking about Android again with Monday’s interview, and you can tell he was setting up the pieces for what Google will tackle during this week’s I/O keynote.

Pichai dismissed talk of combining Android and Chrome OS, but when it comes to Android’s biggest challenge, he noted an interesting dilemma: “Without changing the open nature of Android, how do we help improve the whole world’s end-user experience?”

It sounds like he’s trying to figure out new ways to move Android’s design forward without leaving behind too many Android devices. Android is already heavily fragmented — one quick glimpse at Google’s Android platform tracker shows almost half of the devices out there aren’t yet running Android 4.0 — so Pichai is probably worried about making that situation worse.

A new Nexus 7

Google’s inexpensive Nexus 7 tablet was by far the most significant announcement made at last year’s I/O conference. It didn’t have the flash of a giant skydiving sequence — but then it didn’t need it. The prospect of an inexpensive and powerful Android tablet was more than enough to prove its worth. The Nexus 7 proved a cheap tablet didn’t have to feel cheap, and it ultimately went on to become one of the most successful Android tablets.

This year, expect Google to show off a newer Nexus 7 that’s faster, thinner, and perhaps even cheaper. We’ve seen rumors circulating about such a revamp, and it makes sense for Google to announce a new Nexus 7 now. Just imagine the attention a $150 revamaped Nexus 7 would get. (And even better, imagine if Google could continue selling the existing model for just $100 or less.)

No new Nexus phone

The Nexus 4 debuted last fall, so it’s way too soon for Google to show off yet another Nexus device. I won’t rule out an LTE Nexus 4, though — the lack of LTE was my biggest gripe in my review of the Nexus 4, and by this point Google may have managed to score LTE support with carriers.

There’s also word that Google-owned Motorola is working on some killer smartphones for this year, which could end up overshadowing whatever new Nexus is in the works. Don’t expect those Motorola devices at I/O either — if they’re as interesting as we’re hearing, they’ll get their own blowout media event in a few months.

No more Nexus Q talk

Come on, now.

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

BlackBerry managed to squeeze in one surprise announcement during its huge conference keynote this morning: BlackBerry Messenger, the company’s popular messaging app, will finally jump to the iPhone and Android this summer.

This is the first time BlackBerry has brought BBM to other platforms, and it’s something the company’s fans have been begging for over the past few years. It’ll be available on iPhones running iOS 6 or greater and Android Phones running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

“We will make BBM available as the premiere multi-platform IM solution all around the globe,” said Thorsten Heins, Blackberry’s CEO, on stage today during the keynote. “Even better, it’s free.”

Heins boasted that BlackBerry Messenger already has more than 60 million users (not a huge surprise, since it’s a popular feature among the company’s 80 million users) and more than 10 billion messages are sent every day through the service.

“Why are we doing this now? It’s a statement of confidence,” Heins said. “The BlackBerry 10 platform is so strong and support has been so good that the time is right for BBM to become an independent messaging solution.”

He calmed the BlackBerry faithful by confirming that the company will still offer the “premiere and most integrated” BBM experience. Initially, iPhone and Android BBM users will be able to send chats and join BBM groups. But eventually the other platforms will see all of the BBM features out now, including screen sharing and voice and video chat.

Heins also announced BlackBerry Messenger Channels today, which is a way for brands to send messages directly to their fans. Think of it like a Facebook brand page located entirely within BBM. Brands will be able to send news updates to followers as well, so it will function almost like a news reader.

With the launch of channels and the promise of multi-platform compatibility, Blackberry Messenger is increasingly becoming the most interesting Blackberry property.

Photo: BlackBerry livestream

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Yup, you still live in a world where singer Alicia Keys works for BlackBerry.

On stage at today’s BlackBerry Live conference, Keys, the company’s Global Creative Director, announced the BlackBerry Scholars Program, a four-year scholarship that’ll be available to outstanding female students around the world. Applicants will also need to be focusing on specific science and technology curriculums to receive the scholarship.

“It’s clear we need to elevate more women to leadership roles,” Keys said.

She pointed out some startling disparities between men and women in the technology industry: Even though more women earn college degrees than men, only 5 percent of women lead startups, 56 percent leave the technology industry after entering it, and women make up only 11 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs. While the BlackBerry scholarship won’t immediately fix these systemic problems, it’s an effort to level the playing field a bit.

“This is more than just a scholarship, this is the beginning of a powerful network of women,” Keys said.

Photo: BlackBerry livestream

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It’s been five months since BlackBerry changed its name and launched its first BlackBerry 10 smartphones, the Z10 and Q10. Today the company is holding its annual BlackBerry Live conference (formerly called BlackBerry World) in Orlando (yes, the day before Google’s I/O developer conference begins).

Proving that BlackBerry is targeting all markets, Heins announced the company’s first budget BlackBerry 10 device, the Q5. It’ll come in red, white, black, and pink, and Heins describes it as a device “built for emerging markets.” It looks like a colorful version of the company’s previous BlackBerry Curve line.

The Q5 will launch globally this summer, but no pricing was announced. (Expect it to be cheap, obviously.)

“Some of you said last year would be the last conference for BlackBerry. I’m happy to say, they were wrong,” said BlackBerry CEO Thorsten Heins on stage at the event. “We are not only still here, we are firing on all cylinders as a company… We’re definitely in the race. In one year, we’ve brought this company to a profitable quarter.”

BlackBerry needs all the help it can get. I loathed the Z10, which was so half-baked it felt like a device the company should have released two years ago. The keyboard equipped Q10 seemed like a better fit for the company’s audience, but it wasn’t released until several months after the Z10.

“We will show the world that Blackberry understands mobile better than anyone else … it is in our DNA,” Heins said. “BlackBerry 10 as a platform is built for mobile.”

BlackBerry now has more than 120,000 apps in its app store, and it’s getting popular apps like Skype with the recent BlackBerry 10.1 update. The company also lets developers easily run Android apps on BlackBerry 10, so it’ll be interesting to see just how many of those apps are actually from Google’s platform.

Taking the term “mobile computing” a bit literally, BlackBerry also showed off a concept Bentley vehicle powered entirely by QNX, the operating system at the core of BlackBerry 10. Heins showed off two-way video calling with full stereo sound, which also took advantage of the car’s large touchscreen display.

For a more real-world view of what QNX can do, Heins was join on stage by Johann Jungwirth, the CEO of Mercedes Benz’s North American R&D group. Jungwirth pointed out that QNX is already being used in some Mercedes cars. “All of the cars we are bringing to market now are connected and have the ability to be ‘always on,’” he said.

WunWun’s helpers can do almost anything for you in Manhattan, like snag a cupcake from your favorite bakery, recommend a great jazz bar in Soho, and even wait for the cable guy in your apartment. Now businesses have a way to take advantage of WunWun’s army of helpers for deliveries.

The New York City-based company is today launching Power, a platform for on-demand deliveries for stores that don’t yet offer any delivery service. Stores can also use Power for branded deliveries, giving customers more of a luxury delivery experience.

“[Power] kind of happened naturally, we built WunWun and sent helpers to these stores — even the people who worked there asked us to do their own deliveries,” said Lee Hnetinka, WunWun cofounder and chief executive, in an interview with VentureBeat.

WunWun (which stands for “What you need, when you need”) is kicking off Power’s branded delivery experience with the boutique men’s style retailer Anthony Brands. Online orders made between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. will be delivered that same day by a WunWun worker in Anthony clothing.

After launching its beta in January, WunWun has carved out a place for itself among Manhattanites. While the company isn’t revealing any specific user figures yet, it’s won endorsements from celebrities like Rosie O’Donnell (who apparently needed a juicer ASAP) and has gathered a surprising array of repeat customers. WunWun charges just $15 for deliveries and $2 for every 5 minutes worth of other services.

If u live in NYC u must try this new app called WUN WUN – they will get u what u need when u need it – for 15 bucks delivered 2 ur door !!!—
Rosie O'Donnell (@Rosie) March 20, 2013

According to Hnetinka, one person uses WunWun simply to get coffee delivered every day, while another user requests help daily to move furniture at an event space.

WunWun competes with the likes of TaskRabbit, Postmates, and Exec, but Hnetinka sees his company differently from each of those. “We are not a task service or an errand service, we’re making things on demand,” he said. With the launch of Power, the company will be able to further differentiate itself from the competition.

Photo: WunWun

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It came as a shock.

In March, Andy Rubin, one of Android’s co-founders and the man who led it to world dominance, announced he was stepping back from his role spearheading the mobile OS. His replacement: Google’s Chrome OS head Sundar Pichai (pictured).

Google didn’t have much to say about what that massive leadership change meant for Android, and Pichai was strangely quiet about the shift as well. Now just a few days before Google’s I/O developer conference kicks off, Wired’s Steven Levy has finally gotten Pichai to chat about Android’s future.

The conversation covers most of what you’d expect, including why Google is developing two operating systems at once (Chrome OS and Android), Pichai’s thoughts on Facebook Home, and the status of Android’s revenue model. Here are a few things we learned from the interview:

Pichai sees Chrome OS and Android similar to how Apple handles OS X and iOS: “Users care about applications and services they use, not operating systems,” he said. Having two operating systems lets Google be nimble as computing changes over the next few years to include more devices, sensors, and displays.

There may be a more “synergistic answer” for juggling Android and Chrome OS down the line: Google is likely thinking about how it can eventually streamline both operating systems. My guess? Chrome OS will likely be absorbed into Android down the line.

Pichai’s biggest challenge with Android is improving the entire world’s user experience (without making it more closed): It sounds like Google is thinking hard about how to make Android a more uniform experience like iOS and Windows Phone without affecting Android’s openness.

Pichai finds Facebook Home “exciting,“ but hints that such Android customizations may not stick around forever:

“Some users really want this,” he said. “We don’t want to get in the way of that. [But] in the end, we have to provide a consistent experience. As part of that, with every release of Android, we do go through changes. So we may make changes over time. But if this is what users want, I think Facebook will be able to do it. We want it to be possible for users to get what they want.”

In that statement, you can feel the tension we’ve heard from plenty of Googlers around Facebook Home. While it’s a great way to show off Android’s customizability, Home also shows how easy it is for competitors to completely co-opt Google’s platform.

Pichai uses a Samsung Galaxy S4 (but not the cheesy eye-tracking feature): He also doesn’t seem too worried about Samsung’s Android dominance (it’s basically the only company making a significant revenue from Android devices). Pichai points to Microsoft and Intel’s “very codependent” relationship as a historical example of how two companies can be a bit over-reliant on each other.

Facebook’s HTML5 snub doesn’t affect how Pichai views HTML5: “There are other companies with very successful apps that have taken an HTML 5 approach on mobile and done really well,” he said. “For instance, a lot of magazines have switched from native back to HTML 5 for the mobile apps.”

Google isn’t too worried about generating more revenue from Android: Pichai points out that Android serves as a gateway to Google’s core services, which makes it inherently useful to the company. Additionally, he noted that Google quadrupled payments to Google Play developers in 2012.

I/O is going to be less about gadgets this year: Basically, don’t expect anything like last year’s crazy Google Glass skydiving stunt. Google also doesn’t have any big product or operating system updates to announce, Pichai said.

Photo: Google+

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Finally, there’s an Android phone that doesn’t make me miss anything about the iPhone. It’s called the HTC One, and it’s the best Android phone I’ve ever laid hands on.

It might also be the best smartphone I’ve ever used.

That’s saying a lot. Until now, the iPhone 5 embodied everything I wanted in an ideal smartphone: a solid-yet-elegant design, seemingly limitless speed, and a great screen. Android phones have certainly come close, but up until now there’s always been something that inexplicably held them back: the Nexus 4’s lack of LTE, the Galaxy S4’s cheap-feeling plastic case, or Android’s own design immaturity until Android 4.0.

What makes the HTC One so great? Simply put, it’s a phone that never leaves me wanting. It has a great camera, it’s freakishly fast, and its screen is fantastic without needing to be oversized. It also packs in several features I never thought I’d want in a smartphone but that I’ve found myself coming back to quite a bit.

Did I mention it’s gorgeous? Holding the HTC One in your hand will instantly make your current phone seem cheap and dated. Yes — even if your current phone is an iPhone 5.

Perhaps most of all, I appreciate HTC’s restraint. Unlike Samsung’s pile-on of features and questionable technology in the Galaxy S4, just about everything in the HTC One feels like a deliberate choice meant to create a better experience. That’s important, as it may just be the company’s last chance to turn its dismal fortune around.

It’s just too bad that most buyers will probably ignore it.

The good: It inspires pure gadget lust

The HTC One is so striking that strangers didn’t hesitate to ask me questions about it. “What is that?,” was a common refrain among New Yorkers as I was testing the phone throughout the city. I could tell they noticed it wasn’t just another Galaxy S or iPhone. It was something completely different — and they just had to know more.

One young couple I talked to, both Android owners, immediately noticed that the HTC One felt more substantial than the Galaxy S phones because of its solid metal case. They also appreciated the clean design of the phone, as well as HTC’s Sense software, which they noted was more tasteful and less intrusive than other Android phones they’ve used. These weren’t gadget geeks either, which made the conversation all the more intriguing.

I’ve tested plenty of phones in New York City, and the HTC One has managed to get me more attention than any other phone from random passersby.

You can chalk up its immediate appeal to that case, which is carved out of a single piece of metal and evokes Apple’s MacBook Air. HTC stacks the phone’s hardware to take full advantage of its limited internal space, which makes for a slightly rounded rear that fits comfortably into your hand. The HTC One feels like an evolved form of last year’s One S, which was one of my favorite Android phones so far. (Since it was only available on T-Mobile in the U.S., most people didn’t even know it existed.)

From afar, the HTC One looks similar to the iPhone 5, but up close it’s distinctly different. The One’s 4.7-inch screen commands most of its front, and it’s flanked by noticeable-yet-attractive speaker grills. Its screen is bright and vibrant with a sharp 1080p display. It even looked flawless under direct sunlight while wearing polarized sunglasses.

I initially thought the One’s stereo speakers were a gimmick (who really uses their phone like a boombox?), but I’ve grown to enjoy its ability to project decent audio. It’s particularly great for watching YouTube videos with friends — and it’ll amaze people used to tinny smartphone speakers. The One also includes Beats Audio support, but, as always, its impact on music quality felt negligible aside from making things a bit louder.

Under the hood, the One packs in a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor running at 1.7 gigahertz, as well as 2 gigabytes of RAM. Those are the same basic specs as Samsung’s Galaxy S4, and you can be sure that most other new Android phones will match it as well. For the most part, that means you can expect similarly fast speeds across most modern Android devices. The big differentiators for smartphones now are build quality, style, and features — all of which the One excels at.

It’s been a while since I’ve been unable to keep my hands off of a piece of tech, but the One’s combination of confident style, speed, and useful features has made it my go-to gadget over the last few weeks (beating out the iPhone 5 and iPad Mini).

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Anna Alenius-Mathson is the head of communication for Rebtel.

Ever since Mother’s Day was established in 1908, Americans have asked themselves the eternal question: “What should I get for Mom?” And for more than a century the answer has usually involved giving her either greeting cards or flowers (or both). The explosion of mobile apps has found a way to change this, bringing mom squarely into the digital age, with products designed to make her feel close even though the distance between you may be great.

So if you’re looking for some new ideas on how to make mom feel special, here are a few clever app ideas that just might do the trick.

Say hello to virtual scrapbooking

Help Mom get on board with one of the nation’s top hobbies with the ScrapPad Mother’s DayPhoto Journal (Free), a virtual photo album scrapbook for the Mac and iPad. For Moms that are already Scrapbooking pros, this app will enable her to abandon her glue stick and create top-quality scrapbook layouts quickly and easily.

Albums can be organized and stored systematically and text can be easily entered in a variety of fonts and colors.

The best part is that all ScrapPad album pages can be shared with others or printed with excellent resolution, so even if Mom doesn’t own the app, you can send the album as a gift so she can show it off proudly to her friends.

Give mom the gift of professional style photos

The Camera+ ($.99) app for iPhone and iPad will let mom fine-tune your mobile camera until it takes photos as well as a pro camera can. It offers a variety of shooting modes, a stabilizer, exposure adjustments, even a grid tool that lets you use the Rule of Thirds to make compositions more intriguing.

The app uses your iPhone’s flash as a continuous fill light to improve the quality of your photos, and there’s even the ability to add aftereffects, use filters, do cropping and touch-up, add borders, as well as an easy-to-use storage system and sharing capability, so Mom can save and share all those sharp photos of her kids and grandkids.

If cards are ‘a must’, why not try a fresh approach?

The Cleverbug Cards App (Free) not only gives you the ability to customize and send your own cards, but it also reminds you about upcoming birthdays, anniversaries and special events. It conveniently stores all of your friends’ and family’s birthdates in proper order and offers hundreds of cards that are classified into useful categories (birthdays, anniversaries, etc.), which you can customize with personal photos or special messages.

The finished design can then be printed out by Cleverbug on high-quality card stock paper and mailed anywhere in the world. Or you can simply post your customized card directly to your Mom’s Facebook wall to show her that you’re thinking of her.

Help Mom chill out with the relaxation app

Give Mom the opportunity to relieve the tensions of each challenging day with a “sound bath” app called Serenity ($1.99), which claims to offer thirty different video and audio options that will help listeners unwind and relax.

Videos include a beautiful waterfall, peaceful fields, underwater vistas and even heaps of adorable sleeping kittens, while sounds include rain, distant thunderstorms and moving water.

There’s also undulating abstract forms that combine with sound to create synchronized light shows, which can be an effective tool for meditation or for use prior to sleeping. Mom can even watch it with Apple TV or stream the high-quality audio to her AirPlay speakers for maximum enjoyment.

A new twist on the Mother’s Day bouquet: Virtual flowers

If you’re completely dead-set on flowers, why not try something a bit unexpected.Flowerly (Free) is an app that will let you send a bouquet of virtual flowers to anyone you love in seconds. Bouquets range in appearance; some are free and some are part of premium bundles.

All you have to do is customize your own message, choose a contact from your iOS address book or your Facebook friends list, and combine it with the bouquet using a card template. Then, mail the whole virtual gift either by email or via Facebook.

The ease of sending makes it worthy download, not just for your Mom, but any Mom you know that deserves some love and recognition.

Send a virtual heart beat (… the next best thing to being there in-person)

Mom probably hasn’t heard your heartbeat since the pre-birth ultrasound days with her doctor looming close by, so surprise her this year with the gift of your own beating heart, which will bring back fond memories of babyhood — and motherhood.

Re:Beat (Free on iTunes and Google Play) allows you to capture and record the exact rhythm of your beating heart by placing your fingertip upon your phone’s camera or by tapping the screen to the rhythm of your heartbeat. The pattern of your heartbeat will then be transformed into a warm animation whose sound and vibration are perfectly in sync with your own heart. You can even send a greeting with your heart like, My Heart Will Always Beat For You or Wishing I Was There.

In terms of imagination and creativity, all these great options leave the traditional flowers-and-card option far behind, so if you can’t be there in-person, why not surprise here with one of unique ideas, which will give her something she can truly treasure, while keeping you close to her heart.

Anna is internationally responsible for all strategy and planning pertaining to Rebtel’s PR and communication activities. Anna has more than a decade of experience in the field of PR, marketing, digital media.

Mother’s Day card via Someecards

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Nokia continued its befuddling marketing roll-out for the Lumia 928 today — even though we’ve seen ads for it already, as well as a Nokia-produced camera comparison — by announcing that it will hit Verizon Wireless next week on May 16.

Nokia is also holding a large press event in London next week, which the entire tech world assumed would be centered on the Lumia 928. The company could still use the event to further show off the Lumia 928 (or surprise everyone by showing off something completely new, like a Windows 8 tablet).

In a blog post today, Nokia confirmed that the Lumia 928 sports most of the features of its predecessor, the Lumia 920, while packing in a slightly redesigned case and xenon camera flash. The 928 features a 4.5-inch screen, as well as support for wireless charging accessories. I’m just hoping its lighter than the Lumia 920 — as intriguing as that phone was, it felt like a brick compared to other modern smartphones.

While it’s a slightly minor upgrade, the Lumia 928 is significant because it’s Verizon’s first high-end Lumia smartphone. Up until now, Nokia has focused on AT&T for debuting its top-end Lumias, while Verizon has had slim pickings with mid-range devices like last year’s Lumia 820.

Now Nokia can target an even bigger audience for its most desirable devices (although this marketing campaign probably won’t do much to woo people away from the iPhone 5 or Galaxy S4).

The Lumia 928 will cost $100 on Verizon (after a $50 mail-in rebate) and comes with a $25 credit for the Windows Phone app store.

Matthew Witt is the Executive Vice President, Director of Digital Integration at TRIS3CT, a full-service advertising and promotions agency in Chicago and Los Angeles.

While most marketers have focused on Twitter and Facebook as social channels for their brands, Instagram has skyrocketed in popularity, particularly among the coveted Millennial audience, because it enables them to express the very unique way each user sees and experiences the world.

If Twitter and Facebook are truly about me-based, outbound expression, telling the rest of the world what you’re doing and thinking, then Instagram is about the inbound experience, what you’re observing and taking in that makes you want to share that moment with everyone else.

That critical distinction makes Instagram a special opportunity for marketers to craft visual narratives at the intersection of brands and people. It’s an opportunity that has increased with the recent introduction of “Photos of You.” This feature allows users to tag other people in their photos similarly to the way they can do so on Facebook (Instagram’s parent company).

Following the announcement of the new feature last week, Ad Age speculated that Nike, as an example, could tag LeBron James in one of its images. This model, building engagement around celebrity sponsorship, is similar to an existing practice on Instagram, in which celebrities with vast numbers of followers are paid to share branded photos. Those images are essentially visual versions of celebrities’ paid tweets about certain products and services. Such an approach to creating compelling social content is questionable.

Ultimately, a blatant paid endorsement strategy is not as authentic as the kind of engagement I envision with the “Photos of You” feature.

Imagine instead if Nike chose to post a photo of a high-school gymnasium scoreboard, one that seemed like random Americana to everyone but those who played under it. And what if Nike celebrated a few unknown fans by tagging that photo with a handful of its almost 1.4 million followers, a group of normal student athletes who played in that same gym, all working hard to “find their greatness?”

Nike as a brand sees the world through the lens of human potential, and the content they share must reflect that. While LeBron James is a magnificent athlete and a terrific choice to represent Nike, selling a brand within a particular platform should adhere to the principles that make that platform captivating. A barefaced advertisement simply does not constitute engagement.

Just this week, Ohio State University uploaded a gigapixel panoramic photo of commencement to its website and asked the class of 2013 to tag themselves in the photo using Facebook. Although Facebook is a different platform, that tactic represents the kind of interaction and social storytelling that earns traction for a brand.

“Photos of You,” like most attributes of successful social networks, is about evolving and enhancing the experience for the people who live their digital lives through it, not the advertisers that hope to leverage it. So, like every good piece of socially driven content creation, brand storytelling that is authentic to the experience, the people who use it, and the true promise of the brand that brings it to life will be what succeeds.

As the EVP, Director of Digital Integration at Trisect, he spearheads digital thought-leadership, collaborating with the all departments and disciplines to develop and execute digitally-focused, integrated platforms for our clients.

Before joining Tris3ct, Matt was the VP, Director of Creative Innovation for Y&R, where he worked across all accounts in the Chicago office and also collaborated on other WPP network projects. He can be reached at @MatthewWitt on Twitter.

In-flight Wi-Fi is one of the best aspects of modern air travel — even though it’s far slower than what you’d get from a 4G LTE smartphone or a  typical home broadband connection. But that could all change in a few years.

Yesterday the Federal Communications Commission approved a plan to open up wireless spectrum to speed up in-flight Wi-Fi, the New York Times reports. While it’s only the first of many steps that need to be taken, it shows that the FCC is aware of the growing importance of getting online during flights. (At this point, it’s practically a requirement for me during any cross-country flight.)

Current in-flight Wi-Fi technology gets speeds of around 3 megabits per second per plane, which is about ten-times slower than your typical home broadband connection (and slower than speeds than you see on LTE 4G). That’d be a decent speed for a single person’s Internet connection, but right now it’s shared across everyone who signs up for in-flight Internet. That’s one of the reasons Gogo ended up raising its prices — by limiting Internet service to people willing to pay a higher price, it can actually improve the experience of its service.

By using the new wireless spectrum, a newer format of in-flight technology could see speeds of up to 300 gigabits per second, or 30 times faster than your typical home Internet connection. The new technology would be able to take advantage of a wider array of wireless spectrum, as well as maintain better contact with the plane, FCC officials said. The agency plans to let ISPs purchase a license to share spectrum with satellite communications companies, which will be used to implement a cell-tower based system for in-flight Wi-Fi.

The big problem? It’ll likely be years until we see the faster in-flight Internet technology implemented. But once it does arrive, anyone on a plane will be able to stream hi-def movies, play online games, and access large files over cloud storage. And hopefully, the new technology will also drive down the price of in-flight Internet service. (Right now GoGo charges around $25 for the privilege to use its service for the entire day.)

Airplane photo via Shutterstock

Watch out, Ouya, a new challenger has entered the ring to bring mobile games to TV screens.

BlueStacks, which made a name for itself by bringing Android apps to desktop computers, today announced a new subscription service for mobile games called Gamepop.

For $6.99 a month, the service will give you access to 500 popular Android gaming titles on your television through a custom game console (which looks a lot like Boxee’s old set-top box). BlueStacks is also offering the Gamepop console and controller for free if you pre-order this month.

The notion of bringing Android games to the big screen is hot right now, thanks to Kickstarter darlings like Ouya and GameStick. But it’s still unclear if this will actually be a big gaming market — Ouya’s initial release has disappointed many hopeful fans, and there aren’t many mobile titles that can take on traditional console games yet (although they can certainly be just as addictive) .

But according to BlueStacks CEO Rosen Sharma, the company has grander ambitions for Gamepop than simply bringing Android games to your TV screen.

“This is like Netflix for gaming — offering it across all devices is a big deal for us,” he said in an interview with VentureBeat. “You can envision from our past that it may show up on other devices. That’s how we view the space.”

BlueStacks has partnered with prominent mobile gaming developers like Glu Mobile and Halfbrick for the service. It’s also simple for new developers to join up — all they need is a game on Google Play, Sharma tells me. BlueStacks shares its subscription revenue with the developers (depending on how much their games were accessed), and it also lets developers keep all in-app purchases made through Gamepop.

The company was particularly inspired by Japanese carrier KDDI’s subscription mobile app service Au Smart Pass, which gives customers access to hundreds of popular paid apps for just a few bucks a month. In just one year, that service managed to bring in $250 million in revenue for KDDI.

BlueStacks has been working on Gamepop for the past year, Sharma tells me, and it plans to launch the service this winter. The company just announced that its namesake desktop player for Android apps has reached 10 million users.

Campbell, Calif.-based BlueStacks has raised $15 million so far from Andreessen Horowitz, Ignition Venture Management, Intel Capital, and others.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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After spending $1 billion on Instagram last year to keep pace with the mobile photo explosion, Facebook is now reportedly ready to spend a similar amount on popular social driving app Waze.

The news is being reported by Israeli news site Calcalist, as well as other local publications. Calcalist reporter Assaf Gilad previously broke the news on major Israeli startup acquisitions like Facebook’s $100 million Face.com buy and Apple’s Anobit purchase, the Next Web points out.

Waze’s smartphone apps offer free GPS functionality for drivers, but they’re also buoyed by plenty of social data. Drivers can get a real-time view of current driving conditions using Waze and can report traffic issues to local Waze users. The company now has around 45 million users, and it was previously at the heart of acquisition rumors involving Apple and Microsoft.

It may seem a bit strange for Facebook to spend $1 billion on a social GPS app, but it actually makes plenty of sense when you consider Facebook’s mobile ambitions. After all, Facebook didn’t spend $1 billion on Instagram just to get photo filter technology — it bought Instagram to take advantage of its explosive user growth. Similar to Instagram, Waze has a solid base of users who keep its apps open for extended periods.

With Facebook Home, we saw just how far Facebook will go to dominate your mobile experience. (Waze was also prominently displayed as part of Facebook’s Home launch imagery.) Waze would give Facebook a way grab the eyeballs of millions of drivers, which would be a worthy followup to its recent local search efforts.

If true, the news would show the big difference in the way Facebook approaches acquisitions compared to a more traditional company like Microsoft. Facebook isn’t afraid to pay big for young startups with plenty of traction — meanwhile Microsoft is reportedly looking to purchase Nook’s troubled digital business for $1 billion.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Waze has raised $67 million so far from investors including Kleiner Perkins, BluerRun Ventures, and Magma Venture Partners.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

OK, we get it, Nokia. Your Lumia cameras are pretty darned great for low-light shooting.

Nokia has just released a video showing just how well the camera on its new Lumia 928 Windows Phone performs at night compared to the iPhone 5 and Galaxy S III (I guess even Nokia is waiting in line for a Galaxy S4).

Not surprisingly, the Lumia 928′s 8.7 megapixel PureView shooter smokes the competition with sharper images, better colors, and less blur (the Lumia’s optical stabilization is a big help with that). It’s based on technology from Nokia’s 808 PureView phone, which was notable for its astounding 41 MP camera. Unfortunately, we still don’t know how much different the 928′s camera is from the Lumia 920, which had an 8MP PureView camera.

Nokia seems to have learned its lesson from its controversial faked Lumia 920 promotional video, which ended up overshadowing much of that phone’s great camera tech. It looks like the company shot this latest video right on the Lumia 928 at the Adventureland theme park in New York.

Nokia will officially unveil the Lumia 928 next week in London. Judging from a premature print ad, it’ll eventually land on Verizon Wireless in the U.S.

Much like Gmail’s five year-long beta period, expect Google Glass to be a “work in progress” for some time.

Google today released the first major update for Google Glass after it finally began rolling out to early adopters, Phandroid reports. The “XE5″ update includes a bunch of notification updates, as well as some useful features like easier searching from anywhere in the Glass interface and better battery charge estimation.

It’s surprising that Google is only now getting around to adding some of the new features like crash reporting and international dialing. That goes to show that, despite looking like something from the future, Glass is still very much in its early stages.

Expect plenty more updates like this as Google learns more about how people are actually using Glass. Everyone participating in the Google Glass Explorer program are basically guinea pigs before Glass makes its way to the general public.

The new features in the update include:

• Change to sync policy: require power + wifi for background uploads
• Crash reporting
• Incoming G+ notifications (direct shares, comments, +mentions), including ability to comment and +1
• Incoming Hangout notifications
• Transcription of queries & messages is now wicked-fast
• Long-press to search from anywhere in the UI (no longer just from off)
• International number dialing + SMS
• Hop animation on disallowed swipes in the UI
• New On-Head Detection calibration flow
• Show device Serial Number on Device Info card
• More reliable estimation of battery charge remaining
• New recipient-list mosaic

Photo: Project Glass/Google+

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

After a successful collaboration with the Nexus 4 Android smartphone, Google may also be working with LG for yet another Nexus device, reports the Korea Times.

Let’s be clear: The Korea Times is often wrong, but it would make sense for Google to tap LG’s services again. The Nexus 4 was a solidly built Android phone — and most importantly, Google and LG were able to offer it at a bargain off-contract price of $299. (It’s unclear how much Google subsidized that price, but I’d wager that LG also tried to reduce manufacturing costs as much as it could.)

But after spending a few months with the Nexus 4, its design issues began to grate on me. Its glass back just felt cheap (and kitschy with that reflective grid), and the soft touch trim felt boring (and was quick to get grimy). And let’s not even get into its crummy camera. Overall, the Nexus 4 constantly reminded me that LG doesn’t really innovate with its designs — it just tries to copy the good stuff from other manufacturers.

The Nexus 4′s lack of LTE was its biggest problem when I reviewed it, but over time LG’s design inexperience ended up hurting more.

It’d be much more interesting if Google worked with HTC again for a Nexus phone, especially after the impressive HTC One showed that it can still innovate. HTC has also come a long way since the days of the Nexus One. But given HTC’s current financial troubles, Google would probably want a more stable partner for its next Nexus device.

We’re also hearing that Google-owned Motorola is working on a killer “X Phone” for release this year, which could end up being the Android device Google wants to push more this year. If the X Phone project is as significant as we’ve been hearing, it’d probably make sense for Google to work on a minor Nexus upgrade with LG once again.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

LocalResponse’s pitch is simple, but ingenious for the ad set: it combs social media data to better target ads on mobile devices and desktops. That means more interesting ads for you, and hopefully better conversions for advertisers (especially those struggling to figure out how to make mobile ads work).

The social focus seems to be paying off for the company, as it announced today that its first quarter revenues increased 716 percent from last year. That’s particularly notable, since its revenues for January 2012 ended up equaling its sales for all of 2011.

“There’s been this hunt for [ad] inventory that performs better and is more targeted to the end user,” said Nihal Mehta, LocalResponse’s chief executive and co-founder, in an interview with VentureBeat. “I think we are one of the few ad networks that actually really perform.”

Mehta laid out three big reasons why the company is performing so well: More brands are shifting their ad spend to digital (he predicts 2013 will be the biggest ever for digital ads); the economy is on the rebound and brands are realizing consumers are ready to spend again; and finally, consumers are more social than ever, which gives LocalResponse plenty of data when it comes to targeting.

“We make ads more relevant and more contextual through these social signals,” Mehta said. “If you tweet ‘I’m hungry,’ you could see a banner ad for Pizza Hut on your phone. If you check-in to Wal-Mart on Foursquare, you could see an ad for Target the next time you go to CNN.com.”

The company’s strong ad performance has attracted some big clients like State Farm and Best Buy, 19 percent of which are Fortune 100 companies. It also announced today that it’s opening an office in Los Angeles. In an ad campaign using LocalResponse’s Direct Intent Targeting, L’Oreal saw a 0.19 percent click-through rate — ten-times the typical click-through rate of around 0.02 percent.

LocalResponse competes with 33Across and SalesForce’s Marketing Cloud (built out of the remains from Buddy Media), but Mehta tells me it has built something truly unique. The company has upgraded its infrastructure to handle 10 billion social media signals a month (which is almost the same as Twitter’s monthly usage), and it’s also natural language processing algorithms to determine intent from social data.

Mehta felt particularly vindicated in LocalResponse’s social focus after hearing about Foursquare’s potential plans to resell check-in data to advertisers. That’s something he predicted would be huge two years ago.

three words: check-in. retargeting. kaboom.—
nihal mehta (@nihalmehta) June 16, 2011

LocalResponse’s technology enables ad targeting to carry over from mobile to desktops, but the company isn’t particularly focused on cross-platform targeting yet. Mehta revealed that the company is eventually planning to take advantage of your social media identity for deeper cross-platform capabilities eventually.

Since the company is so focused on ad targeting, I asked Mehta how LocalResponse could take advantage of something like Google Glass.

“Glass for us won’t be an ad interface, but it could be a data signal,” he said. For example, it could take advantage of the fact that you’re taking a lot of pictures of a particular place or product, or simply spending a lot of time looking at something. “We want to stay laser-focused on social signals. But I think it’s cool, I think it will have as much of an impact as the iPod had in the music industry and the iPhone had in the phone industry.”

LocalResponse was founded in 2010 and has received around $8 million in funding.

In the blink of an eye, Facebook has quickly become a major player for  connecting with local businesses.

Taking advantage of that huge opportunity, New York City-based Yext announced today that it will now let its users synchronize their local business information with Facebook. Yext’s platform lets business owners manage their listings across sites like Yelp and Yellow Pages from a single dashboard. (Which, hopefully, leads to less inaccurate data and more sales.)

“It’s a fairly long call thing … Half of local searches occur on mobile devices, and 24 percent of the time [for most users] is spent on Facebook,” said Howard Lerman, Yext’s chief executive and cofounder, describing how he believes Facebook will inevitably become a bigger local search player over time. “So, without really trying, Facebook has kind of captured the market with their Nearby product … that has profound implications for the local discovery ecosystem.”

Facebook last year upgraded the “Nearby” feature in its mobile apps to include local businesses (previously it only showed nearby friends). Last month, that feature was renamed to the more descriptive “Local search.” Facebook also revealed that it had two billion connections (mostly Likes) between users and local businesses, along with 645 million page views.

With its new Facebook integration, Yext lets its users manage their Facebook listings for local businesses with the same dashboard that manages information for other local listing sites. You can manage comments on the pages, as well as manage your own posts.

Best of all, Yext offers business owners a simple way to manage multiple Facebook pages for specific locations — making them more visible with Facebook’s Nearby feature. Yext also compiles data from all of those separate listings — like people currently checked into different locations — as a single figure in your main brand page.

I asked Lerman if Facebook actually wants companies to have multiple pages on its site (especially since many will appear identical, aside from things like address, phone number, and business hour differences).

“Facebook is clearly committed to local discovery experience, these are the pages that appear in their local search,” he told me. “It’s not the brand page. It doesn’t make sense to see there’s a brand nearby. It makes sense to see there’s a location nearby.”

The company began work on this Facebook integration shortly after releasing its Power Listings+ product in January, a massive update that lets businesses manage information like staff biographies and store maps.

Yext has raised more than $65 million from Marker, CrunchFund, Sutter Hill Ventures, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), WGI Group, and others. The company sold off its pay-per-call business last fall, and it’s now focusing entirely on local listings.

At this point, Lerman has gotten the “eccentric genius” startup founder vibe down pat. So I wasn’t surprised when he related his thoughts on Yext’s current standing through a surfing metaphor.

“I don’t surf, but I know some people who do, and I just had an image in my head of a guy on a board with no waves, swimming around to catch a wave,” he said, describing the typical situation of a startup founder. “Now there’s a giant crest — when that happens you have to stand up and not fall off your board.”

Photo: Daniel M. Silva/Shutterstock.com

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

HTC’s first quarter saw a massive decline in revenue and profit — but the company expects a rosier second quarter.

The Taiwanese phone maker reported first quarter revenues of $1.45 billion with just $2.88 million in profit (which it previewed last month), a 98 percent fall in profit from last year. The numbers are also a huge decline from the already low $34.4 million in profit from HTC’s previous quarter.

The bright side: The company projects that second quarter revenues will jump to $2.4 billion (and hopefully profits will follow).

“We’re focusing a lot in terms of marketing,” said Peter Chou, HTC’s chief executive, during the company’s earnings call today, according to the Wall Street Journal.

HTC used to be the top Android smartphone maker in the U.S., but Samsung’s popular Galaxy S series of phones, together with the iPhone, quickly eroded HTC’s market share. Now, HTC doesn’t even rank among the top 5 smartphone vendors (when it comes to phone shipments), according to IDC.

The company’s troubles are particularly crushing since it just debuted the best Android phone I’ve ever laid hands on: the HTC One. My full review of that phone is coming soon.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The ongoing saga of approving taxi hailing apps in New York City is beginning to resemble a wild ride in one of the city’s taxis.

After getting the green light last week from a New York Supreme Court judge, NYC’s smartphone taxi hailing program has once again been blocked, Bloomberg reports. The program, announced in December by the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission, would make it possible for you to hail and pay for a taxi using a smartphone app.

This latest setback is bad news for taxi apps Uber and Hailo, which both just recently announced that they would be participating in the program. We’ve tried to get a comment from Hailo about the news, but their press representative hasn’t yet responded to us.

Several NYC taxi groups, including the Livery Roundtable and Black Car Assistance Corp., initially sued to block the hailing program in February, but their suit was dismissed last week by New York Supreme Court Judge Carole Huff. That decision was nullified today by an Associate Justice, Helen E. Freedman, who issued an emergency injunction of the hailing program, as well as a full review.

“This faux ‘pilot program’ is so fundamentally flawed and illegal in so many respects that it had to be stopped,” said Mastro, an attorney representing the livery cab companies, in an e-mail to Bloomberg. “And now it once again has been.”

We’re seeing a major struggle here between entrenched labor organizations and startups chomping at the bit to disrupt inefficient markets. The hailing program will likely get approved eventually, but expect to see a similar back-and-forth in other cities when it comes to taxi apps and other apps that significantly impact the real world.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

It looks like Facebook’s huge mobile risk is turning into a huge mobile opportunity.

The social network reported astounding mobile growth today, with 750 million monthly active users on mobile devices (a 54 percent increase from last year). That’s a significant chunk of the 1.1 billion monthly users Facebook saw during the quarter.

Even better, Facebook reported ad revenues of $1.25 billion for the quarter (up 43 percent form last year), 30 percent of which came from mobile ads. That’s around $375 million in revenues from mobile ads alone. Not bad for a company that was previously worried about its capability to make a buck on mobile.

Facebook also noted that 189 million people only accessed it on mobile devices. It’s hard to read much into that number now, but this shows a significant amount of reach for Facebook with young people who don’t spend as much time on computers (or people without access to computers in general).

It’ll be interesting to see how the launch of Facebook Home last month will affect Facebook’s mobile performance going forward. Right now Home is only available on select Android devices, but as it reaches more phones and countries, it could have a big impact on mobile ad revenue (since it’s basically making Facebook’s ads a part of your phone’s home screen).

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Microsoft still isn’t divulging official Surface numbers, but it looks like it’s at least making a (tiny) dent in the tablet market.

Microsoft shipped 900,000 Surface tablets for the first quarter, accounting for 1.8 percent of the tablet market, according to IDC’s latest tablet numbers. Altogether, Windows 8 and RT tablet shipments across all manufacturers hit 1.8 million during the quarter.

Those numbers are slightly less than Strategy Analytics’ latest figures, which noted that 3 million Windows tablets were shipped for the quarter. The true numbers likely lie somewhere between those two figures.

While Microsoft is clearly just getting started with the Surface devices, its numbers seem particularly poor compared to Apple’s 19.5 million iPads shipped in Q1, as well as Samsung’s 8.8 million units shipped. Surface shipments were likely hurt by their limited availability and the late release of the Surface Pro, which started shipping in February in the U.S. and Canada.

PC shipments also dropped precipitously in the first quarter, and IDC wasn’t shy about blaming Windows 8 for the decline.

The Surface Pro made up most of the Surface units shipped, according to Strategy Analytics. I found the Pro to be a far more useful device than the Surface RT, mostly due to its speedy Intel processor (which can also run older Windows programs).

While Google Glass may seem like a step towards a crazy science-fiction future, for some reason it lacks a fairly basic security feature: a lock screen.

That left the door open for Roundarch Isobar’s Mike DiGiovanni to develop a lock screen of his own, which he calls Bullletproof. Whenever Glass detects that it’s been removed from your face, the app presents a screen that can be unlocked with your own combination of gestures on Glass’s touchpad.

It’s not exactly groundbreaking, but it’s certainly necessary for a $1,500 computer that you wear on your face. Without Bulletproof, anyone could grab your Glass unit and send whatever images and messages they want to your friends and Google+ page.

The bigger question: How the heck did Google release a next-generation device without basic security protection? I’d argue that Glass is even more vulnerable to theft than your smartphone, since it’s typically resting on your face unattached, instead of being hidden in your pocket or purse. Glass also can’t be folded down like a typical pair of Glasses, which means it’s a fairly big target if you leave it on your desk.

If  your expensive Glass headset does get stolen though, you can always track it and wipe it remotely from the MyGlass website. Still, that doesn’t help if someone surreptitiously nabs your Glass unit to send malicious messages.

Update: A Google spokesperson sent along the following statement around Glass’s security:

We recognize the importance of building device-specific protections, and we’re experimenting with solutions as we work to make Glass more broadly available.

Via: Slashgear; Photo of Sergey Brin wearing Google Glass: Chris Chabot/Google