Best Buy is putting the iPhone 5 on sale starting Sunday. Two plus two equals?

According to a report by AllThingsD, Best Buy is planning to offer $50 off the iPhone 5, 4S, and 4 models starting Sunday and lasting for four weeks. The electronics retailer is also planning to offer discounts on older Android smartphones from Samsung and HTC … but not the just-released and hot-selling Samsung Galaxy S4.

Source: http://sjbbs.zol.com.cn/2/30_11361.html

The iPhone 5S in limited production, supposedly.

Rules aside, it’s not completely unheard of for iPhone to go on sale. And Apple has been experimenting lately with discounts (excuse me, incentives) in price-constrained markets such as India. But if it’s not the sign of the iPhone 5S showing up next month, it’s certainly the footsteps we’re hearing from the not-too-distant future.

Apple is certainly getting ready to release the 5S, with screens reportedly entering mass production in June, and one report saying actual phones hitting the market in August.

Which, if correct, means we still have three months to wait.

However, analyst Brian White of Topeka Capital Markets has predicted a June announcement and a July ship date for iPhone 5S as well as a new, cheaper iPhone Mini, which he says will be available in multiple colors.

photo credit: Incase. via photopin cc

Apple’s been through some tough spots historically. And while anyone who remembers the “beleaguered” days of the late 90s and early 2000s can’t think that the company is in too much trouble right now, with the stock losing hundreds of billions of dollars and Google’s Android taking massive mobile market share, there’s definitely a sense that Apple’s best days might be in the rear-view mirror.

But Cook has maintained 90-plus-percent approval ratings internally, according to Glassdoor:

That’s just a shade below Steve Jobs’ lifetime rating of 97 percent.

In addition, Apple employees are still pretty happy to be working at the iconic Cupertino company. Employee satisfaction, which reached a peak 80 percent in the middle of 2012 when Apple’s stock soared to over $700, has only dropped slightly to 78 percent.

Which doesn’t mean that working at Apple is easy. Or that working for Tim Cook is easy.

Cook looks for early hours, according to one Apple manager in Cupertino, who said he was “a CEO who demands work before 6 AM every day, and ‘accountability without control.’” And another Apple employee, an engineer, complained about work/life balance at Apple … or rather, the lack thereof.

“No work life balance is to be expected while working at Apple. Weekly management reviews and expectations from management is that you are reachable after work hours.”

The upcoming Worldwide Developer Conference will be an interesting test for Cook, and Apple. After basically telling the world not to expect any new products before fall, an iOS7 reveal will likely be the big news at the developer-focused show — and well as, possibly, announcements about developments in Apple core services like music and media.

Those announcements have to be good enough to reassure the Apple faithful within and without the company that Apple is still the leader in mobile operating systems and ecosystems and can still amaze and delight its customers.

And its team members.

Image credit: Dean Takahashi

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

App recommendation engines are getting booted from Apple’s app store because they suck, according to a new player in the app-finding business. But Hooked Media has come up with an entirely new take on app recommendation that has two unique qualities.

One, it doesn’t suck. And two, it can’t be rejected by Apple.

“Obviously, app discovery is a problem on iOS and Android,” Hooked Media CEO Prita Uppal told me, thinking of the hundreds of thousands of apps on both platforms. “The key problem from Apple’s perspective was that no one was solving the problem … they were just looking at opportunities to make money.”

That’s why Hooked Media chose to avoid simply relying on manual curation or social discovery, which is what most app recommendation engines use. Instead, Uppal says, Hooked Media generates app recommendations for its users based on 46 independent factors, including time of day, day of the week, what apps you’ve installed, which you’re deleting, the sequence in which you use them, your demographic factors, and yes, some social factors as well.

The result?

A 30 percent uptick in installs based on Hooked Media recommendations — and 33 percent more play time on games downloaded in response to a recommendation.

And most of that is without the typical app-recommendation app that shows you the free games, highlighted apps, and deals of the day. Because instead of just being an app, Hooked Media provides an in-app app recommendation service that helps mobile developers monetize and get distribution.

In other words, a large part of Hooked Media’s app recommendations happen in other apps: In that moment when you’ve just finished a level or played a game, the app flashes up suggestions of other apps to download. These aren’t just paid ads, they’re personalized recommendations.

“We’ve built a partnership on both platforms,” Uppal says. “We’re helping companies that are already doing this do it better, smarter, and more personal … and increasing conversion rates over 20 percent.”

In other words, because the app suggestions are more targeted, users who see them are more likely to download and use them — and app developers are more likely to be able to monetize their app via other developers’ marketing incentives.

“The minute you add that predictive rating for users, it totally transforms it from being an ad unit to something that’s personal to me, which totally changes that experience,” said Uppal.

It also changes the definition of an app recommendation engine from an app to a cross-platform service that developers can embed in their own apps via an API. That makes it virtually impossible for Apple to take action against Hooked Media, because it’s in thousands of apps — not just an easily isolated one.

Hooked Media, which has been making online game recommendation engines for years, spent a dedicated two and a half years building the technology behind the recommendations for mobile apps. That’s partly due to the many, many factors in Hooked’s complex algorithm, and partly due to the need to provide customized recommendations based on huge numbers of criteria in literally milliseconds.

The service won 25 million users in beta on Android, and an app recommendation app that it built — partially as a proof of concept — was promoted by Google twice. That’s a far cry from Apple, which has been busy kicking app suggestion apps out of the store.

Source: Hooked Media

Personalized app recommendations

And while there’s good opportunity on iOS, which Hooked Media is happy to serve via its API, Android is where there’s a “bigger opportunity,” according to Uppal.

That’s not really due to the fact that Android has more users and now has or shortly will have more apps. Rather, it’s due to the fact that the “app store” functionality is fractured on Android, with more than 200 Android app stores in existence, according to Hooked Media.

“The app discovery problem becomes even more challenging on Android — users don’t even know where to go,” Uppal said. “In the U.S., Google Play is definitely dominant, but outside the U.S., Google Play is very small.”

In Korea, Uppal told me, Google Play is only used by a fraction of Android smartphone owners. (That seems a little extreme, given the fact that Korea ranks number two in the country list for downloads on Google Play.) And, she pointed out, Verizon is soon coming out with its own store. Hooked Media, however, will seamlessly find the right app store to download the right app, dynamically.

The core point?

Hooked Media has built a platform, app store, and app agnostic app recommendation engine. It’s one that can’t be banned by Apple. And it’s one that benefits developers who are seeking monetization as well as those who are seeking distribution.

photo credit: Daniel Y. Go via photopin cc

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Facebook is becoming a mobile app platform — and you’ll be able to use it even if you have no interest in building Facebook apps.

That’s driven partly by Facebook’s recent acquisition of Parse, a company that helps app developers by providing backend services such as database management, sync protocols, data serialization, and other technical issues.

But it also reflects Facebook’s changing view of itself as a platform spanning platforms of all kinds: mobile phones, tablets, the Web, and even Windows 8.

“We live in this world of heterogeneous devices. We’re trying to build a platform where third-party developers can create applications that span across all of those devices so they can really focus on people,” said Doug Purdy, an engineer who works on the Facebook platform, during a press briefing today.

Facebook acquired Parse on April 25 to bring its “mobile backend-as-a-service” (mBaaS, believe it or not) into Facebook’s developer platform.

One of the questions raised at the time was whether Parse would continue operating independently. It’s a mobile development tool, not a Facebook development tool, so some of its customers may be creating iOS or Android apps that don’t link into Facebook at all — and that’s OK, according to Facebook.

“Parse is not going away,” said Ilya Sukhar, Parse’s founder [above]. It is his fourth day working on the Facebook campus, so he acknowledged that he was still learning his way around the company. But he was quite clear on the future of Parse.

For instance, Parse currently supports Twitter for user authentication, and it will continue to support that, Sukhar said. “That’s not going away,” he said.

Additionally, all Parse services currently run on Amazon Web Services, and that’s not changing, either, despite that Facebook owns huge data centers of its own. And the pricing model won’t change: Parse will still offer a free tier, a $200/month tier for more serious users, and an enterprise tier for high-traffic customers.

All this should be quite reassuring to Parse’s current 80,000 developer customers, whose apps run on 200 million different devices, Sukhar said.

Naturally, Facebook hopes that mobile app developers integrate their apps with its platform, and many of them do. According to Purdy, 80 percent of the top-grossing iOS apps integrate with Facebook, and 70 percent of the top-grossing Android apps do, too.

The company is also encouraging developers to utilize Facebook as an app discovery tool. With 800,000 apps in each of the major mobile app stores, just getting noticed is a major challenge for devs. Facebook is building tools to help with that, starting with Facebook ads. Currently, if you click on an ad for an app within the Facebook iOS app, it takes you directly to the Apple App Store — without leaving the Facebook app — so you can install the advertised app.

Facebook has also made some tweaks to other parts of its platform. It’s splitting the “read and write” permissions that apps have to ask users for — so each app now has to get separate permissions from the end-user for reading their Facebook profile and friends list, and for posting to Facebook on their behalf. The change has been well received by end-users, according to Purdy.

And the company will soon enable Facebook apps to show up in Facebook Open Graph search results, something they don’t currently do.

“One of the things Parse does really well, and does it better than anyone in the world, is that it makes it really easy to create an iOS app and then move that to Android, move it to Windows Phone, and so on,” said Mike Vernal, another senior Facebook platform engineer (he was the lead engineer on the Facebook Connect project in 2008).

“We want it to be about people, and not the devices that they’re on.”

Photo: Ilya Sukhar, the founder of Parse, at the Facebook campus. Credit: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

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In other words, the giant that sold almost 400 million phones last year is getting bigger. And faster.

There’s a reason Samsung gobbles up 95 percent of the profits in the Android device market. It knows how to produce, market, distribute, and sell phones and tablets in massive numbers.

And, it doesn’t rest on its laurels.

The company also announced today that it would soon be introducing more color variations. The S4 is currently only available in black or white, or, as Samsung likes to say, Black Forest and White Mist. New color options coming this summer include Blue Arctic, Red Aurora, Purple Mirage, and Brown Autumn.

Meanwhile, five and a half months after the introduction of the iPhone 5, Apple is still not offering varying color options, although this are rumored to be in the product pipeline, probably for a fall release.

One caveat on the numbers: Samsung typically counts shipped units as sold units. And the company very carefully worded its announcement as “global channel sales,” which should likely be construed as units that are sold and delivered to its channel sales partners. So it’s possible that in terms of actual units in the hands of customers, Samsung has not yet hit the 10 million mark.

But there’s no doubt that the device is successful and will sell a boatload of units.

I still maintain, however, that the extra software, add-ons, and flashy-but-buggy gewgaws Samsung has added to the device will spell the beginning of the end of Samsung’s smartphone dominance. And would suggest people interesting in buying one wait for the Nexus version, which is basically an Galaxy S4 stripped of all Samsung’s software, and featuring a pure Google Android experience.

Image credit: Samsung

Days after finalizing a $1.1 billion Tumblr acquisition, and coming hot on the heels of a massive image-buffing retrofit of the photo-sharing community Flickr, Yahoo has bought yet another company.

Finally, after years of virtual irrelevance at the search/media company, Mayer has Yahoo doing huge and interesting things again.

PlayerScale, a cross-platform game infrastructure startup that provides tools for games played by 150 million users on platforms such as iOS and Android, announced the acquisition on its site today. And — unlike recent Yahoo acquisitions like Astrid – CEO Jesper Jensen said the company would continue to operate as it has, supporting over 2,600 developers and 4,000 games.

In fact, he added, PlayerScale is adding 400,000 users a day.

“With Yahoo’s backing, we can crank out awesome products and improvements to our platform faster than ever before,” Jensen said.

Source: Sean Ludwig

Marissa Mayer

That would be a major change from recent Yahoo acquisitions such as Stamped, OnTheAir, Snip.it, Alike, Summly, Jybe, and Astrid, all of which have been shuttered or put on notice. But it makes sense, given PlayerScale’s volume of business and growth rates.

And the move seems to make sense given Yahoo has now signaled a move into casual gaming on iOS, Android, Facebook, the web, and even Xbox.

PlayerScale’s platform helps game developers with pretty much everything they need to make their game platform work, except the game itself. It includes payments, chat, analytics, virtual currencies, distributed caching, authentication, social sign-on, leaderboards, localization, and more.

Here’s CEO Jesper Jensen’s announcement in full:

Today is a great day — both in our journey with PlayerScale and for users of our Player.IO product. We are happy to announce the next big step toward our goal of building the best possible gaming infrastructure platform: we have been acquired by Yahoo!. And don’t worry, we’re not going anywhere. Our platform will continue to support the same great games that you love playing today … and in fact, it will only get better from here!

Our goal has always been to help developers build the best possible games, without having to worry about building and scaling the infrastructure required to operate today’s biggest successes. In working with the folks at Yahoo!, it has become clear that we share this passion.

We have spent the past four years growing a three-person startup into a product that powers games played by over 150 million people worldwide and we are adding over 400,000 new users every day. In the last four months alone, we have increased our daily user growth rate by almost sixty percent. With Yahoo!’s backing, we can crank out awesome products and improvements to our platform faster than ever before. We will continue to support our existing product and deliver new services to help you grow and manage your success in cross-platform gaming — whether it’s casual, social or mobile.

Today marks a milestone for PlayerScale and I want to sincerely thank the team, our developers and millions of users for the adventure so far and can promise there will be more to come.

- Jesper Jensen

Image credit: Sean Ludwig/VentureBeat

“We offer unified photo storage across all your devices, for free, at 1,024-pixel quality,” founder Steve Cosman told me a few weeks ago in Toronto. “Or you can pay $5/month for unlimited resolution.”

Tomorrow MyShoeBox is launching version two of its photo backup and sharing service, with a new iPad app, updated mobile apps, and a new shared galleries feature that you use to build grouped sets of photos with people you went on vacation with or family members who shared an event such as a wedding.

The freemium model has helped the company get a quick start.

Source: MyShoeBox

Search and self-quantification

After exiting from Toronto accelerator Extreme Startups in the fall, the service saw 13.4 million photos uploaded in November, its first month. And, Cosman says, MyShoeBox users upload far more photos than Facebook or Flickr users — 3,200 each, compared to Facebook’s 220 and Flickr’s 320.

But the value proposition is much more than photo backup.

Instead, MyShoeBox is a way to enjoy all of your photos, all of the time, on any device you have. Frankly, for most people, their photos are strewn around their main computer (photos from their actual, official, camera), their phone (snapshots from their built-in camera), and their social networks (uploaded from wherever you happened to be at the time). There’s no unified view, no way to see — and search — all your photos at once.

Using MyShoeBox for the first time syncs your photos up to the cloud-based service automatically, in the background, and installing the services’ mobile apps on your Android or iOS-based phone will do the same.

That’s helpful, because we often want to see more of our photos on our mobile devices.

“Our new iPad app is an incredible way of browsing your entire photo collection,” Cosman says. “And it’s one of the only ways you can get your full photo collection on your iPad … most people don’t have enough space.”

What most interested me when I chatted to Cosman is MyShoeBox’ solution to a problem that I think I share with many other digital photographers: enjoying your own work and finding photos. A former program manager for Microsoft’s augmented reality team for Windows Phone, Cosman has placed special emphasis on automated sorting, tagging, and exploring features.

“So many people that have given up the concept of a photo collection,” he says. “Faces, places, and things are important ways to automatically categorize photos. And they keep getting smarter every day.”

So MyShoeBox highlights places you’ve been, photos you took last year at this time, events, cameras you used, and more, creating what the company calls “an interactive infographic” of your life. That includes personal quantification data like the top times you take photos, and your most photographed neighborhoods.

And if you want to search your photo collection, MyShoeBox has just rewritten its search features to be much faster and more powerful as its power users often have more than 15,000 photos each.

“iOS, Android, Windows, Mac … it works pretty much anywhere,” Cosman says. “And once together, it’s automatically organized.”

MyShoeBox is based in Toronto, Canada, and is currently raising a financing round. Its new iPad, iPhone, and Android apps will be live in Google Play and the app store tomorrow.

Image credits: MyShoeBox

A month ago CEO Tim Cook disappointed Wall Street and crushed Apple fans by saying that Apple had amazing new products coming out “this fall and throughout 2014.” Which means that none were coming out this summer, and which also means that if some new products are coming out in fall, they need to be in testing now.

Cue iWatch testing rumors.

Taiwan’s Economic Times says that Apple is currently testing 1.5-inch OLED screens from Ritek’s RiTdisplay after first building prototypes with a 1.8-inch display, which Apple rejected as being too large for a wrist-based computing accessory. The OLED screens use OGS touch sensors (“one glass solution”), which will theoretically help Apple keep the iWatch thin and light.

But Apple has presumably not ordered in volume, as Ritek recorded a first-quarter loss. Apple production partner Foxconn has also reportedly received a small-scale trial production order of 1,000 devices.

Testing the new, smaller size right now — and getting into preproduction — could help Apple get product ready for delivery to consumers in late summer or early fall.

But don’t hold your breath.

The iWatch has been rumored since late 2012, including in some almost-certainly-Apple-initiated NYT, Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg leaks. According to at least one study, a full 20 percent of U.S. consumers want an Apple iWatch, sight unseen, and an Apple patent published in March of this year reveals that Apple is thinking about flexible wrap-around displays built into a transparent housing.

Oh, and perhaps one of the reasons for the rumors?

Samsung is supposed to be working on a smart watch, too. Perhaps Galaxy Watch? Meanwhile, Google’s entrant into the wearable computing sweepstakes is already being hacked on, developed for, and ogled.

Or would that be oogled?

Image credits: iWatch mockup by VeneStudio; Hat tip: C|Net

That lasted a few months, at least.

Nokia and Intel had decided in 2010 that they needed an answer to Apple’s iPhone juggernaut which was taking high-end smartphone sales away from Helsinki and making it completely obvious that the king of chips had no chips in the mobile processor poker game. Meego was the answer, and Meego would be the operating system that would lead the then-still-powerful Nokia back to the forefront of the mobile market, and would make Intel relevant in small, low-powered, and battery-life-efficient phone CPUs.

Unfortunately, one loser plus another loser often just equals two losers. And, unfortunately for Nokia and Intel, Google and Samsung took their lunch and ate it, too, as Android began to reign uber alles. So Nokia turned to Microsoft for salvation — and a very painful process it has been — and Meego lost its way.

But not entirely.

Jolla, a new and independent smartphone vendor which almost no-one but mobile wonks has ever heard of, took the core of Meego and built Sailfish, a new mobile operating system that is built on an open-source project named Mer that is the new incarnation of Meego, and is just now teasing the coming-soon release of its very first device, the oddly named and oddly designed but also oddly attractive “The Other Half.”

Surprise, surprise, Jolla is based in Helsinki, Finland, where there just happens to be a surplus of top-notch mobile talent available lately (shocking, isn’t it). And surprise, surprise, all of the top Jolla leaders are ex-Nokia employees. Almost two years ago, Jolla announced its intentions of bringing a new smartphone to market. The biggest surprise is that they seem to be succeeding.

We are Jolla. We are Unlike

Jolla appears to be a two-part device, consisting of a 4.5-inch screen, a buttonless main phone handset, and various colorful plastic cases, or “other halves.”

Snap one on, and your phone OS changes.

Source: Jolla

The Sailfish OS almost reminds you of Windows Phone tiles.

Changes color, changes battery life, perhaps, changes content such as apps and media, and changes in other ways yet to be invented, based on the creativity of Jolla and partners.

Actual devices have yet to be released, and the details are fewer than might be desired, but the key point is that the Jolla is Android app compatible. Which, frankly, is probably essential for any new smartphone platform entering the market today. The smartphone market is an ecosystem battle, not a device battle primarily, and any new entrants with any real aspirations for success have to plug into what is already available and — largely — a global standard.

Interestingly, the main Sailfish operating system screen appears to draw from Windows Phone design elements, with titles on the home screen that aggregate information that you might be interested in.

According to Engadget, the phone will have a dual-core processor (type unknown), LTE, an 8MP rear camera and a front-facing camera, and have 16GB onboard storage plus micro-SD expansion.

At the very least, it’s an interesting take on mobile that enables users to participate in some — if not all — of the benefits of the world’s leading smartphone operating system, while still having some unique and differentiating factors. Jolla says it will offer the world’s best multitasking experience, and will be so intuitive that you can operate your favorite features “without even looking at the device.”

Main navigation on the phone is buttonless, with the four main icons appearing to be Phone, Messages, Browser, and Apps. The Sailfish operating system will also support gesture control, the company said.

I’m assuming that full Google integration and access to Google services such as music would not be included, and syncing contacts and other core data would not be as simple as on a straight Android phone.

However, Jolla seems to be competing on differentiation. And while the jury will be out on how successfully they’ve achieved it until we have actual devices in our hands, at first glance, they’ve succeeded.

Image credits: Jolla

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Twenty-four hours after Google released three location tools for its app developers, startups are already integrating the APIs into their products.

The founders of Valet stayed up all night to get the new API into their app as quickly as possible. Valet launched in April in the Google Play store to help people remember where they parked. It tags your parking location with a pin and reminds you when to pay the parking meter. You can set a timer for your meter and share the location on social media. There is, of course, no guaranteeing you will avoid fines, but it does cut down on the “human error” often responsible for the tickets.

Founder Will Roman recently relocated to San Francisco from Austin, Texas, to work at another startup. After “losing” his car a few times in the unfamiliar city and getting slapped with multiple parking fines, he recruited cofounder Josh Deffibaug, and the two set out to build Valet.

The app received mention on Gizmodo and a couple of Android blogs for its “simplicity and beauty” and was attracting a good number of users through word-of-mouth. But when Roman and Deffibaugh heard the news about Google’s new location APIs, they saw an exciting opportunity.

“Everyone who drives can appreciate this,” Roman said in an interview. “Parking tickets suck, and so does forgetting where you parked on a busy day, when visiting a new city, or after a night of drinking. With integration of the new Google Play Services location API’s, all features can be automated on over 95 percent of Android devices thereby preventing you from ever loosing your vehicle or getting a parking ticket again. We’re the only parking app in the world to integrate the Google Play Services location API’s.”

The location application programming interfaces (API) are part of Google Play Services, a tool kit for Android developers. Integrating location-sensing features to your app can be challenging and Google’s fused location provider “intelligently manages the underlying location technology” to make building location-aware app easier and less energy-intensive.  The technology combines GPS with on-phone sensors like the gyroscope, accelerometer, and barometer to collect your movement data and deliver a more accurate, immediate, and power-efficient application.

Using “Activity Recognition,” your phone can figure out whether you are walking, cycling, or driving which has clear applications for fitness apps. The Valet founders realized that the same technology could be used to tell when a car goes from driving to park mode, and can automatically drop a pin in your parking spot without you having to push a button.

“The new location APIs are more accurate, simpler to integrate, and back ported,” Roman said. “They solve a lot of the fragmentation issues of Android and enabled us to cater to the broadest market possible with even better reliability than previously possible.”

Competitors include iCarPark, Car Finder AR, Find My Car Smarter, Car Locator, Where Did I Park. Valet is based in San Francisco, where parking does in fact suck.

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

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Samsung’s Galaxy S4 may be tasteless and unrefined, but that’s not stopping lots of people from buying it.

After a month on the market, the Galaxy S IV will hit its 10 millionth device sold next week, according to Samsung co-CEO Shin Jong-kyun.

That may not sound like a big deal, but the importance of the announcement is clear once you consider that it took Samsung 50 days to get to that point with the Galaxy S3 and five months to get there with the S2.

All of this underscores one clear and unsurprising point: Samsung still dominates the Android world, even though its phones lack the stylistic finesse of the iPhone or even our recent Android favorite, the HTC One. Tasteless or not, Samsung is pulling in the cash: According to recent estimates from market research firm Strategy Analytics, Samsung captured 95 percent of the $5.3 billion in profit made by Android in the first quarter of this year. If Samsung doesn’t own Android in influence, it definitely owns it in profit.

Strategy Analytics agrees. ”We believe Samsung generates more revenue and profit from the Android platform than Google does,” Strategy Analytics’ executive director Neil Mawston said in a statement.

That probably horrifies Google — or at least you’d like to think so. But instead of feeling threatened by Samsung’s devices, Google is embracing them — albeit in its own special Google way. Yesterday, the company unveiled its own Nexus-ified version of the Galaxy S4, which will be sold stripped of Samsung’s TouchWiz interface. Google’s message with the device was pretty clear: “Samsung, we love your hardware, but you can keep the software.”

Turns out there are a lot of other people who really love that hardware, too.

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat 

Voiding your warranty, apparently, is as simple as running five short commands. To run those, however, you need a higher-resolution way of communicating with your Google Glass device than the touch-sensitive screen on your specs.

“Fortunately, this is an Android device, and like most Android devices, it has a Bluetooth chip,” Google engineer P.Y. Laligand said today at the chat on hacking Glass.

Source: Google

Glass is just Android, underneath.

So he simply turned on Bluetooth, paired an external keyboard, opened up a terminal window, and typed five commands in ADB, or Android Debug Bridge:

1. $ adb reboot bootloader: (Allows you to access the bootloader)
2. $ fastboot oem unlock: (Removes security precautions, erases user data, and … voids your warranty.)
3. $ fastboot flash boot boot.img: (Replaces the boot image)
4. $ fastboot reboot: (Reboots back into a normal state)
5. $ adb root: (Finally, you have root access and access to all the data partitions)

These are not steps to be taken lightly, according to Google engineer Hyunyoung Song.

“Even though there are recovery methods, there is a chance that you could get stuck in a state from which it’s not easy for your device to be recovered,” she said. “And Google will not support you.”

Google Glass owners who have taken the lives of their $1,500 Google Glass Explorer Edition devices in their hands and bravely gone where few dare, however, have done some exceptionally cool things. One has installed standard Ubuntu Linux on Glass and now programs on Glass using Emacs, a text editor. Another has created an avatar that mimics your head motion, bobbing around just as you do while talking and gesturing.

Source: Google

Danger, Will Robinson! Voiding warranty now!

And Google — while not supporting you if you brick your device — encourages developers to play around in root mode, hacking new apps and experiences which can be then brought into the Google Glass ecosystem.

“Now you’re in root mode,” Song said. “Play around and go nuts with whatever you want to do.”

For the faint of heart, there will be a safety net at some point. Google will be releasing the standard Glass system images, which can be used to recover bricked devices.

Probably.

Image credit: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

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And Windows Phone could jump into second place quicker than you think.

While they’re not Android or iOS-style numbers, Windows Phone sold 7 million units in the first quarter of 2013 for 3.2 percent market share, according to the latest IDC report. Meanwhile, BlackBerry sold 6.3 million units, down a third from the previous year, for 2.9 percent market share — less than half of its share just a year ago. Market leader Android took its customary massive 75 percent of the market, and Apple’s iPhone slipped from 23 percent global market share in 2012 to 17.3 percent share.

“Windows Phone claiming the third spot is a first and helps validate the direction taken by Microsoft and key partner Nokia,” the IDC’s Kevin Restivo said in a statement. “Given the relatively low volume generated, the Windows Phone camp will need to show further gains to solidify its status as an alterative to Android or iOS.”

Those further gains are possible over the next year or two as Microsoft’s primary phone parter, Nokia, transitions to an all-smartphone lineup.

Part of Apple’s quarterly weakness was the company’s lack of any new hardware or significant new announcements. That made Apple slip to its lowest global smartphone market share in years, now less than a quarter of Android’s size, with only 37.4 million iPhones sold to Android’s 162.1 million. But systemically, Apple is falling out of the race for smartphone supremacy. And that puts Apple at risk of being in Microsoft’s sights for the number two position in the global smartphone market share battle.

How?

Nokia is going all in on Windows Phone — mostly by necessity — and now accounts for 79 percent of all Windows Phone sales. The Finnish company has sold over 20 million Windows Phones to date, which is not bad, considering the challenges of Android, iOS, and Microsoft’s stutter-stepping from Windows Phone 7 to Windows Phone 8.

Source: IDC

Global smartphone market share, Q1 2013

But the real opportunity for both Microsoft and Nokia will come as Nokia continues its transition from feature phone sales over to Windows Phone. The company still sold something like 55 million feature phones in the first quarter of 2013, and while those cheap phones are going largely to developing nations, they will transition at some point to Windows Phone.

Those feature phones sales are decreasing, and the transition from cheap feature phone to somewhat more expensive Windows-based smartphones will decrease them still more, but they will be higher-value sales.

And, they might just be high enough, depending on what Apple does in the region of a cheaper iPhone, to catapult Microsoft to number two.

Image credit: Microsoft

Google made a lot of big moves to impress Android game developers at the I/O developer conference in San Francisco yesterday. One of its most interesting new products is an Xbox Live-like network that provides cross-platform multiplayer, achievements, and cloud saves  for mobile titles called Google Play game services.

This suite of tools launched immediately after Google officially revealed it during its keynote presentation. In fact, some developers already updated their games with full support for Google Play game services.

We’ve gone ahead and collected 10 games available now on Google Play that use the new features. Check ‘em out below:

Super Stickman Golf 2: Free

Noodlecake Studios’ 2D arcade golf title gets expanded multiplayer support on Android with the implementation of Google Play game services. The developer added a new multiplayer mode along with achievements, leaderboards, and cloud saves.

Riptide GP: $1.99

Google worked closely with developer Vector Unit to get it on board early for these new Google Play features. The company added leaderboards, achievements, and cloud saves to its popular water-based racing title.

Shine Runner: 99 cents

This is another Vector Unit app. The arcadey smuggling game features the same support for leaderboards, achievements, and cloud saving.

Beach Buggy Blitz: Free

One more Vector Unit app has Play game services support. The company once again added leaderboards, achievements, and cloud saving.

Osmos HD: $2.99

Hemisphere Games’ beloved tablet title, Osmos HD, gets multiplayer powered by Google Play. The studio added local and online multiplayer with friends or with random match-making. It is also introducing 19 new achievements.

Modern Combat 4: Zero Hour: $6.99

Developer Gameloft completely reworked its multiplayer service to work with Google’s new tools. Now players can sign in with Google+ and use that for matchmaking and cloud saves in the first-person shooter.

Townsmen: Free

Studio HandyGames implemented Google Play game services into its medieval city-building title yesterday. Players can now sign in with Google+ to access online leaderboards and 61 in-game achievements.

Farm Invasion USA: Free

HandyGames also added the new features to its 2D alien-crushing title. Gamers can now check leaderboards and achievements for this app as well.

Rocket Island: Free

HandyGames also has some new features for its steampunk hex-based puzzle game. The studio added leaderboards and achievements to the game.

Campus Life: Free

Developer Pocket Gems is using Google Play game services to add leaderboards to its Campus Life sorority simulation title.

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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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Piracy is one of the major issues scaring developers away from putting resources into Android development. Today, at the Google I/O developer conference, Google introduced some new features in its Play game services that will help developers combat piracy.

Google Play game services is an ecosystem that helps developers implement cloud saves, leaderboards, and more in mobile games on Android, iOS, and computers. On Android, however, it has a few extra tricks — like the ability to detect if a player is using an unauthorized version of a game.

“The games team shares developers’ concerns about piracy in Android games,” Android lead engineer Steve Martin told developers at I/O. “Not every game should have to be free-to-play. We’d much rather you guys had a choice in the matter.”

Google Play knows whether a player downloaded a game through the official market or not. It then alerts the developer and lets each studio decide how to deal with the pirate.

“We can return an error to the game if you so choose,” said Martin. “You can decide what your game does next. You can choose whether or not you let the pirated game use Play game services. For example, you could choose to not allow a pirated game to use multiplayer features.”

This is another instance during this conference where Google is focusing on reassuring developers that are hesitant about developing for Android. It’s early in the event, and we won’t know if it is enough — but as of right now, Google is saying all the right things.

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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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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Apple’s countdown (err, up) to 50 billion apps ended today with one lucky winner, as yet unannounced, bagging $10,000 in iTunes money for apps, media, and more.

It’s a good thing Apple hit the number today, because if they waited even another week, the Cupertino company might have been second-best to Google’s Android. At Google’s developer-focused I/O conference today, Google’s Hugo Barra announced that Google Play has just passed 48 billion app installs — and had a massive 2.5 billion just last month.

Just as Apple has done before for major app store download thresholds, it’s giving away the $10,000 gift card to a lucky iOS user who downloaded the 50 billionth app. In addition, 50 lucky people who where the next to download an app have won a $50 gift card — even if they don’t know it yet.

Don’t go rushing to try to be one of those 50, of course … there are about 1,000 app installs on iOS each and ever second.

This is probably the last major app install number that Apple will trumpet to the skies, as Android will be making the big news from now on. At the same Google I/O conference, Android chief Sundar Pichai said that Android has now reached 900 million device activations — far more than Apple.

Samsung’s Galaxy S4 is a nice phone hindered by one glaring fault: Samsung’s TouchWiz interface. Where stock Android is refined and sensible, TouchWiz is tasteless and glaring. It’s not a great experience.

Google, however, is offering a fix. During its keynote at Google I/O today, Google announced a version of the Galaxy S4 that’s stripped of Samsung’s often-intrusive software skin. It’s a Samsung phone with all the best features of Google’s Nexus devices.

“What you’re seeing here is real: this is a Samsung Galaxy S4 with the same software experience we ship on our Nexus devices. It’s Google’s take on Android and it feels awesome on the S4,” Android VP Hugo Barra said today.

The unlocked 16GB LTE version, which works on T-Mobile and AT&T, will sell for $649 via Google Play next month. Best of all, the device will receive prompts to update with each new version of Android, which is one of the best things about owning a device with stock Android.

Google’s Nexus-ified Galaxy S4 may just be the best Android phone yet.

Where’s Steve Ballmer doing the monkey dance when you need him? OK, wrong company. But instead of doing a creepy developer dance, Google’s showing its developer appreciation with five major new features to make more money.

Cold hard cash — now, that’s love!

Google Play product manager Ellie Powers — no relation to Austin — shared the new features of Google Play Developer Console at Google I/O in San Francisco today.

1. Optimization tips: Google automatically generates optimization tips based on what your app does and what users are doing with your app. For example, if your app is selling well in Russia but it’s not localized in Russian, Google will suggest you localize your app.

2. App translation service: Getting translations can be tough, so Google has introduced a new app translation service right in the Developer Console. Simply pick the app, select the language, and pick a translation vendor. Your translations will arrive in about a week.
   

   Source: John Koetsier

   Ellie Powers

3. Usage metrics with referral tracking: “We want to give you all your metrics in the same place,” Powers said, so Google will now show you all your user metrics right in the Developer Console as well as in Google Analytics. This will roll out later this summer. And if you’re using campaigns to promote your app, referral tracking helps you understand which ads are most effective — and integrates with Google Analytics, showing you your google Play referral flow.

4. Revenue graphs: A new tab in the developer console supplies a summary of your app’s revenue, globally or per-country.

5. Beta testing and staged rollouts: If you want to test new features, Google Play now supports beta testing and staged rollouts. Developers can start with a small group of alpha testers, and then roll it out to a larger group of beta testers — using Google Groups, of course. Feedback from these groups only goes to the developers.

Image credit: Google

Google released three location tools for its app developers today, one of which will actually tell the app whether a person is walking, cycling, or driving.

The location application programming interfaces (API) are a part of Google Play Services, a tool chest for Android developers. Adding location-sensing features to your app is difficult and often straining on the phone itself — particularly the battery. To deal with this, Google released the first of today’s APIs called fused location provider. Among other things, this API uses a “low-power location mode,” which collects data on where the person is while using what Google says is less than one percent of the battery power.

Google also opened up APIs for geofencing, or putting a ring around a specific location that can provide data such as when a person enters or exits that circle. You can have up to 100 geofences active simultaneously per apps.

But the last API Google released could be a huge benefit for fitness apps. It’s called Activity Recognition, and it does just that — it feels the person’s movements and determines what they’re doing. It uses a combination of accelerometer data and machine learning classifiers to figure out if you’re walking, cycling, or driving.

“We do it in a really battery-efficient way without ever turning on the GPS,” explained Hugo Barra, Google’s vice president of Android product management.

This makes what is undoubtedly difficult to build on your own, a plug-and-play feature developers with fitness aspirations can use in their apps. Developers could also build much deeper movement analysis around the API.

It may also mean big things for future Google Glass apps. If people actually start wearing Google’s smart eyewear daily, it could become a whole new type of fitness device, joining the ranks of Android phone pedometers and smart wristbands existing in the market.

The APIs are available today for all Android version Froyo and up. If you use Activity Recognition, drop us an e-mail and tell us about your experience.

Google image via Google I/O livestream

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This isn’t even a race.

Second place is LG, with 2.5 percent of the device profits from Android smartphones, and third place is “Other,” with everyone else lumped in to a tiny 2.7 percent share.

“Samsung is, for now, the undisputed king of the global Android smartphone industry,” Neil Mawston, Strategy Analytics’ executive director said in a statement. “We believe Samsung generates more revenue and profit from the Android platform than Google does.”

Globally, Android smartphones accounted for 43 percent of the overall smartphone industry’s profits, the report says. Those profits reached $12.5 billion in just the first quarter of 2013. And due to an ultra-efficient supply chain, “sleek products,” and successful marketing strategies, Samsung has captured almost all of that 43 percent, or $5.1 billion.

Now the question in the Android ecosystem is this: Is Samsung more powerful than Google?

According to Strategy Analytics, perhaps.

“Samsung has strong market power and it may use this position to influence the future direction of the Android ecosystem,” Mawston says. “For example, Samsung could request first or exclusive updates of new software from Android before rival hardware vendors.”

Samsung, which shipped 400 million phones in 2012 and 82.2 million phones, tablets, and laptops in the first quarter of 2013, is clearly on a roll. Android has 75 percent global market share, and Samsung has a massively dominant position within the Android ecosystem.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google temporarily released information about its next mobile operating system, Android 4.3, today. A search for the company’s developer site returned a listing for Android 4.3, which it has quickly removed.

The page referenced security enhancements for the otherwise unannounced Android version. It came alongside a security enhancements release for the existing Android 4.2 operating system. Since the page has been removed, we are unaware of what these security enhancements entailed. Indeed, Android 4.3 is otherwise fairly shrouded, but we may learn more about it today during Google’s developer conference Google I/O.

The Verge grabbed a screenshot of the search result, and it mentions that 4.3 may contain a new kind of Bluetooth that will help save battery life on the phone. It may also come with a new graphics tool that will help game apps and other graphics-dependent apps run more effectively.

Google’s stock price has risen to record-highs this morning in anticipation of what Google might announce. While we don’t know exactly what will come out of this morning’s keynote, this Android 4.3 reveal is the second leak of the morning for Google. Late last night a signup page for a new version of Google Maps popped up and was similarly removed. It is also rumored that Google is launching a music streaming service after reports yesterday that the company had signed two major music licensing deals.

Android image via .RGB./Flickr

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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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

If you’re one of the 6,000 developers attending Google I/O this week, you should know that sensors will be tracking your every step.

Not your individual steps, of course. That would just be spooky. But there will be sensors distributed throughout the conference (May 15-17) tracking anonymous crowd data such as noise level fluctuations, footsteps, temperature, humidity, air quality, and more. In all, Google will be collecting more than 4,000 continuous data streams, according to a post on Google’s Developer blog.

The data, along with the devices and code used for the project, will be made available for public consumption via an open source license after the conference.

During the event, several screens around the conference will display real-time visualizations of the data, showing things like how the crowd is flowing from place to place, which are the quietest places for a nap, and which developer Sandbox sessions are the busiest. I’m hoping the data will also tell us which sessions have the best and worst air quality.

Google’s cloud team is teaming up with O’Reilly’s Data Sensing Lab to deploy hundreds of Arduino-powered environmental sensors to collect the data. These “motes” will be connected to one another via a ZigBee-based mesh network and managed by Etherios’s Device Cloud. Google’s Cloud Platform will collect and manage the data, while Google BigQuery will help analyze the data.

The O’Reilly connection is a timely one, as O’Reilly also puts on the Maker Faire, coming up this weekend, May 18-19. So if you’re a hardware-hacking, Android- and Arduino-loving maker type, you can take all the coding skills you learn at Google I/O and show them off at the Maker Faire just a couple days later.

Photo credit: Google

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Chances are you already own a smartphone, and maybe you have a tablet as well. It’s possible that one is an Android and the other is an iOS device or Windows Phone. Having access to multiple mobile operating systems has its benefits, but it can get frustrating when you have to start repurchasing apps and games.

That’s exactly the issue that Spair Mobile plans to address. The developer is hoping to offer an app on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone that enables individuals to purchase an app once that can then stream to any device running Spair. This means you pay once for a game that works on an iPhone and Windows Phone. Not only that, but the games run exactly the same, and developers only have to build the it once. With Spair’s cloud-gaming functionality, players can also save their progress in the cloud and pick up a game where they left it off on another handset.

Now, Spair is entering an early alpha-testing phase. The company is looking for developers, and signups are open now on its website.

“We see a great desire to change things from developers,” Spair founder Tim Abdullaev told GamesBeat. “It proves that we are doing everything right.”

Abdullaev, who is 16 years old, says his company is working with more than 10 developers and around 30 games for these tests. He also says that the company wants to target anyone who has played Angry Birds with its final product.

“As far as I know, that’s more than a billion people,” said Abdullaev.

The young entrepreneur says his software can eliminate situations where people download games that don’t work on their less-powerful smartphones. It also could enable developers to code a game once and quickly distribute the same title on iOS, Windows Phone, and Android.

One question that is still in the air, however, is pricing for the individual apps.

“We are actively discussing the pricing issue,” said Abdullaev. “But pricing will be in full accordance with the average price in the competing markets.”

Finally, Spair is essentially a competing game market. That’s something that Google, Apple, and Microsoft all forbid in their app stores. That means Spair will face an uphill battle in acquiring users even if it does get it’s technology fully working.

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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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Lockwood Publishing, a successful free-to-play publisher on Sony’s PlayStation Home virtual world, is expanding to mobile games today. The Nottingham, England-based studio is launching a new 3D avatar that exists across mobile games on a variety of platforms.

The company is rolling out the avatar for the first time in its own title, Avakin Poker, which debuts this spring on iOS, Android, and Web browsers. The 3D avatars allow players to create realistic human characters based on the Unity 3D game engine. The poker offering features 3D renders, and it will feel much more like you’re sitting at a poker table in Las Vegas, the company said.

“This reflects a big change in the game industry,” said Joel Kemp, Lockwood Publishing’s co-founder, in an interview with GamesBeat. “We have learned a lot through PlayStation Home and established a strong community there.”

Lockwood is famous for publishing games such as Sodium and Sodium 2 on PlayStation Home. The company pioneered free-to-play high-end releases on the Sony virtual world, and it continues to maintain those games on Home.

“We had great success with Sony, but this is what we have been doing over the last couple of years,” Kemp said.

Now, the organization is expanding into mobile using the cross-platform Unity technology. Similar to systems like Xbox Live Avatars and PlayStation Home, players can create a custom 3D avatar and use it across games. They can have a single XP inventory and a single account across multiple platforms. The poker game is the first of multiple releases that will use Avakin avatars. Players can log into the same account across different channels and play against the same people.

But in contrast to Xbox Live and PlayStation Home, Lockwood has focused its avatars on mobile devices, which haven’t been powerful enough in the past to run 3D avatars. Now, those options are catching up with the consoles, and the time is ripe for this change, Kemp said. Lockwood is considering licensing the Avakin technology to other mobile-game companies.

The avatars will enable player-versus-player competition across platforms in real-time. That’s not easy to do, and Lockwood believes it is the first to do that with 3D avatars (Jawfish Games is doing it with 2D games). Lockwood has created its own cloud-based backend service, which connects different systems. It uses off-the-shelf backend components like Smart Fox server, Edgecast, and Amazon EC2, along with its own software and its home-grown metrics system called Playmetrix. Lockwood will make Playmetrix available to third parties.

The company will release the Avakin technology in the United Kingdom first and tweak it based on consumer feedback. Then, Lockwood will launch it in the Latin American market through BoaCompra, a South American game publisher, this summer. The publisher is pursuing partnerships in other territories where free-to-play business models are big.

Lockwood started in 2005 on social platforms but got a game deal with Sony to work on Home titles. The self-funded firm primarily makes rich 3D games that serve as social multiplayer experiences. The company has more than 40 people working on multiple projects. Rivals include 3D avatar games such as PKR and platforms such as IMVU. Others include Stardoll and Habbo, but those offerings focus on younger audiences.

Kemp said the company will continue to work on console games for next-generation systems in the future. If mobile games one day run on consoles, Kemp says his company will be ready since the games will run on Unity, which should run across all platforms.

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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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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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