Google+ is better than Facebook — at mobile.

Google released a tablet version of its mobile application for the Google+ social network at its Google I/O developer conference. And even though Vic Gundotra’s Google+ presentation was the least exciting and most interruptible portion of the keynote, the tablet application, available for Android and soon for iPad, knocked my socks off.

I couldn’t help but think: This is how a current social network should look on a touch-screen device. So beautiful, so alive with color, so fluid, and so dynamic in its visual delivery of stories is Google+ in tablet form, that the app makes Facebook’s mobile applications look as if they were built in the MySpace era.

Specifically, I love the look of the stream, which now styles content based on popularity (+1s and comments), type (photos, videos, URLs), and the orientation of your device (I’m partial to the landscape view). The tablet app is even more bold and beautiful in design than the recently released iPhone app. The only thing missing? People.

I wasn’t the only one who thought so. In chatting with Altimeter Group mobile analyst Chris Silva about the application, I discovered that he too found Google to be more avant garde than Facebook in an area that Facebook should know best.

“[The app] definitely shows the prowess that Google has over Facebook in terms of mobile design and in creating a captivating mobile experience,” Silva said.

“Facebook … has a potentially, comparatively better arsenal of mobile development talent on board,” he added. “Here’s Google doing all this great development work on mobile with largely internal talent, and Facebook that’s gone out and spent a billion dollars on Instagram, made all these other acquisitions … and still hasn’t yet created that experience that makes me say, ‘wow.’”

As any Facebook user knows, the mobile experience is quite slow, clunky, and choppy when it works. Sometimes the app is barely functional at all.

“It’s funny that the leading social network … is completely lacking in mobile design, while the social network that’s leading in mobile design seems to be at a stasis in terms of growing its users,” said Silva in the most astute observation of all.

It certainly makes sense for Google to invest in building a great mobile experience. Not only is the entire world trading in the web for mobile, but Google+ is itself a social network that sees more mobile engagement than it does desktop engagement.

“We now have more users engaging with Google+ from mobile than desktop. That’s a significant situation, and we take it seriously,” Gundotra said on stage during the keynote.

But here’s the caveat: Silva thinks the app, even in all its glory, boils down to just a bright, shiny object. That means Google+ poses no immediate threat to Facebook.

“Right now, there’s still no reason [for Google+] to displace Facebook as the social network of record,” Silva said.

So while Google can claim that G+ has 150 million monthly active users and that active users are spending 12 minutes per day in the stream, Silva remains underwhelmed.

“[Google+ users] can be engaged for two, three, four, five hours a day. They’re still a small segment of the social networking population. I don’t see anything that’s compelling enough to change how big that slice of pie is for Google.”

But make no mistake, mobile is Facebook Achilles’ heel, and it certainly doesn’t look good for the newly public company to lose to Google in a mobile face-off.

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

There was a time when summer was slow. News would lull. Folks would go on vacation.

Not this year.

Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and now Google have conspired to work technology journalists to death over the past six weeks or so. And this week was Google’s week to hammer another nail into our collective coffin.

So, here’s what happened at Google I/O this week in San Francisco:

• Google launched Jelly Bean, its latest Android OS — and ya know what? It’s pretty damn spiffy.
• The company also launched a home media streaming thingie called the Nexus Q — and ya know what? It almost made us cry, and not in the good way.
• Google+ got a new feature for organizing events and a new API for pulling in your history from around the web.
• Want all the power of Google’s mighty racks of servers for your big, bad computational problems? Google launched Compute Engine just for you.
• Chromebooks are going to be sold at Best Buy. So, you know, if you really hate operating systems, this is your time to shine.*
• Put on your party hats, Office Spacers, because Google Docs are going offline!
• Google co-founder Sergey Brin put his latest product in the hands of blimp-jumpers, leading to a small existential freakout about the purpose of technology and social media in particular.

May your weekend be free of anything related to Google.

*The author maintains her cranky assertion that “Chrome OS is a lie,” since Chromebooks are actually Linux-running laptops with the Chrome browser as the only user-accessible application. “You want an OS? I’ll give you an OS. It’s called Ubuntu, and it’s not at freaking Best Buy,” the aging tech reporter screeched when reached for comment.

---

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.

---

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

All tablets are not created equal. A fact not lost on this reporter, who, at the age of three, learned to love Apple by using the very first Macintosh. Reared on the Apple doctrine, I now demand excellence in hardware, sleekness in design, and that indescribable feeling of pure joy when touching a device.

For the first time in my life, a company other than Apple has given me all that and more.

Unveiled Wednesday during the keynote address at Google’s I/O developer conference, the $199/$249 Nexus 7 outshines the existing class of Android-powered tablets, the Kindle Fire included, for one simple reason: This is the only non-Apple device I would ever buy.

An iPad-owner and lover since day one, I’ve come to view my tablet, which mind you I never actually refer to as a tablet because I’ve always believed the iPad to be superior to any other, as my most pleasurable device. My iPhone and my MacBook Air are utilitarian. I love them dearly, but I think of those devices as necessities, and I primarily associate them with work. The iPad, however, is my play device. It’s my feel-good, sit-back-and-relax toy.

The Nexus 7, which falls into the same category of device for me, has in less than 48 hours carved out a special place for itself in my heart. I find myself reaching for the 7, as I lovingly call it, over the iPad because, well, it’s just so darn cute. I love the size, the feel of the 7 in my hands, the leather-like quality of the back panel, and the overall style of the device.

Holding the Nexus 7 feels right, browsing is fantastic (thank you, Chrome tab sync) and fun, and because it’s running the new Jelly Bean software, the Nexus feels smart, intuitive, capable, and pretty darn slick. Thanks to Project Butter, the 7 feels nearly as smooth as the iPad. No major kinks, blips, or bumps to speak of — at least so far.

I also quite like the arrangement of media on the device. As an iOS user, I was a little disoriented at first, but I quickly became acclimated to the idea of apps on one page, books and magazines on another, movies in their own place, and music on its own screen. This configuration makes it all the more easy to appreciate the content and media recommendations Google serves up in each category, which really do seem to get better with time.

But beyond pleasure, what’s truly remarkable is just how practical the 7 is. Here’s why: When it comes to my web activities, I’ve gone Google. I’m yoked to Gmail, dependent on Google Calendar, tied to Google Docs (and now Drive), leashed to Chrome, and the list goes in. I can’t tell you how convenient it is to have Google as a seamless, interconnected part of the experience. Sure, this isn’t something that’s unique to the Nexus 7, but it’s lovely nonetheless.

Don’t just take it from me though. I talked to plenty of folks at the Google I/O conference who were impressed by this little sucker.

“I really like it. I used the hotel Wi-Fi and started watching Transformers. It looked really good,” developer and This Week in Google host Gina Trapani told me yesterday. “It’s small and light. It’s definitely a better Kindle Fire.”

Trapani, much more of a-know-it-all than I am when it comes to the Android software side of things, was also impressed with the subtleties that Project Butter and Jelly Bean have brought to the Nexus 7 experience. “My main complaint with the Android experience is that it’s slow and choppy, and not responsive,” she said.

But the Nexus 7, running Jelly Bean, provided a much better experience for Trapani. “It’s very smooth, and very fast,” she said. “I can see giving this to my sister-in-law. She’s in the market for a tablet … I’m going to tell her to get this.”

VentureBeat’s gadget guru Devindra Hardawar is also pretty impressed by the Nexus 7, as are gadget bloggers the web round, some of whom went deep into review mode.

Yes, it’s disheartening and a bit defeating that some of my favorite applications aren’t available for the Nexus 7. HBO Go, where are you? I do have a strong feeling, however, that by releasing a stellar device, Google has just given top iOS developers the nudge they’ve needed to build for Android too.

Let’s get to the meat of the matter. Should you buy the Nexus 7? If you’re in the market for an extremely portable tablet and don’t mind the smaller screen size, than absolutely. This isn’t some second-rate device that you should feel ashamed about toting around. No, hold your head high.

Bonus: What you save in price, you can spend on shoes. Okay, that’s just me. But seriously, I’d purchase the Nexus 7 as my primary tablet in a heartbeat. I’d also recommend it to my friends and family members. In fact, this is the very first non-Apple device that I’ve ever said that about — and that’s saying something.

Photo credits: Jennifer Van Grove and Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

The unveiling of Jelly Bean, a.k.a. Android 4.1, didn’t bring that many new announcements. Rather than giving us a big growth spurt, Google showed an Android operating system with more maturity and stability than ever before — and more ways and reasons to actually pay for Android apps.

In a long chat with two of the Googlers who have been most involved with this launch, VentureBeat learned this is exactly what the company intended — not a volcanic eruption of flashy new features, but a steady growth on a foundation well laid.

With the Jelly Bean launch at Google I/O, we saw some speed and performance enhancements and a few pretty UI tweaks, but for the most part, Jelly Bean represents a small iteration on Ice Cream Sandwich, the Android OS that brought tablets and smartphones a bit closer together.

“The Jelly Bean release itself has several platform updates that make this release much smoother, so your games and books are a lot smoother,” said Android developer relations guy Billy Rutledge, referring to the platform’s Project Butter.

But it’s not something consumers or even developers have to work to use. “Developers get to take advantage of all these faster features by doing nothing,” he said.

The myth of fragmentation

And the Google Android team continues to underscore the importance of responsively designed apps that can scale across all kinds of screen sizes and form factors — something that Ice Cream Sandwich was specifically designed to support. Rather than seeing the wide variety of devices running Android apps as “fragmentation” or a liability, Rutledge frames it as an opportunity.

“Jelly Bean makes available the same core principles in the platform since the first release,” he said. “Most developers are not used to this capability, so coming into Android for the first time, you might overlook some of the things that can give you more distribution and more installations.

“Jelly Bean doesn’t offer anything new to make apps run across different devices; it’s always been there.”

Part of Android’s quest to bring one OS to all devices, as Apple has accomplished to an extent with iOS, is allowing all apps to scale for all devices, which Apple hasn’t really accomplished with the iPod, iPhone, and iPad, let alone Apple TV.

“There is no such thing as an Android tablet application,” Rutledge said, referring to the fact that Android lets people run any app on any Android device now. At last year’s Google I/O, the company gave out its first Android-running tablets for developers to use and learn on.

At that time, “Most developers had not seen the Android tablet before, and we released the SDK for the larger screen size at the same time,” Rutledge said. “We’ve seen a lot of pickup with larger screen sizes in the last six to 12 months.”

The myth of the stingy Android user

And as a result, he said, the overall quality of Android apps has seen a marked increase since last year. “We’ve tried to study what’s working well and short-circuit that path to building the right way and making what conumers want.”

Chris Yerga, Google’s engineering director for Google Play, seconded this emotion. He added that the Android Market’s drastic rebrand as Google Play helped cast Android apps in a new light.

“We’ve heard that Android apps are performing as well as or better than apps on iOS,” Yerga began, countering the oft-repeated assertion that Android users don’t pay to play when it comes to buying digital products like mobile applications.

With the Play rebrand, he said, “We wanted to convey fun, the notion that there’s a lot to entertain here. And we wanted to convey that this is a destination for premium content.” In other words, a more expensive-looking storefront would, Google wagered, make consumers more comfortable with putting their money into Android platform apps.

Still, Yerga said, that’s a separate issue from app quality itself. “I’m not gonna take any credit for how much better the apps and games have gotten over the past year,” he said. “That’s all developers. The games and apps have gotten so much better.”

Bringing Play home

The next logical step was to integrate Google Play more tightly with the slick, tablet-ready Android operating system.

Before Play, Google Music, Google Books, the Android Market, and a few other separate products made up a widely distributed (and not in a good way) Google media store. Play tied together all those properties under a single banner, like a high-end shopping mall with a cornucopia of stores.

“The brand launch for Play brought that all together, and now Jelly Bean brings it into Android,” Yerga explained.

“We brought Google Play content directly onto the home screen. There are widgets on the desktop that show you your content, books, music, et cetera. And it adapts to the way you use Google Play. For example, if you listen to a lot of music, it’s going to show a lot of your recent and favorite music there.”

Yerga said Play on Android now also highlights recommendations in homescreen widgets. The widgets will show new apps, games, music, and movies that you might want to download based on a variety of factors, including overall popularity, your own usage behavior, and your friends’ activity.

“We wanted to bring all that stuff together to make it easier for users, but also to be more effective in doing promotions,” Yerga said. “The money we spend promoting Play benefits all those content types.”

Nexus Q, the living room, and beyond

Neither Googler could talk much about the company’s roadmap for Android, but media, new device types, and home automation seem to be top-of-mind for the company right now.

“The center of Android has always been flexibility and support for a wide range of devices… Tablets, phones, these new black home media thingies,” said Yerga, referring to Google’s new Nexus Q home media player.

“Android has really rich tools for building applications that work across a variety of devices. It makes us uniquely qualified to accomplish that goal of interoperating apps and devices.”

Rutledge echoed those sentiments, saying, “We try hard to promote these features and ask developers to consider all the different shapes of devices rather than just the mobile phone they have in their hand.”

In the end, Google will continue to hammer home its message of one OS to rule them all — and the responsive design principles and best practices that make that dream a reality, no matter what form factor.

“I’m looking forward to people getting their hands on [the newest Android tablet] Nexus 7 and Nexus Q,” Yerga concluded.

“It’s an epic odessy building these products… It’s going to be really cool to also see what the developers do with these.”

Image courtesy of laihiu, Flickr

We had some time to unbox and set up our Nexus Q from Google I/O, and the results were what they were.

Basically, it allows you to use a Jelly Bean Android device to control videos, movies, music, and images in your home, either on a TV or through speakers, which can be connected through hard wires.

The setup is pretty simple, but once we got to the end of it, we were a bit underwhelmed by the results. This correspondent’s official stance has always been curmudgeonly but consistent: Until home media devices are as easy and intuitive as putting a record on a record player, home media systems (like Sonos and Nexus Q, in particular) aren’t going to see much adoption outside of hardcore nerds like you and me.

Unfortunately, most hardcore nerds like you and me likely already have complex and costly home media solutions in place. Here’s what our go-to media guru Tom Cheredar had to say about that in his initial review:

First of all, a number of competitors already offer this streaming functionality — and as a complimentary feature. The Apple TV’s Airplay enables TV screen sharing in addition to its support for several third-party media services like Netflix, YouTube, Vimeo, MLB, NHL, and more. And with the purchase of cloud-media startup mSpot, Samsung is also planning to offer this kind of functionality on all its devices, complete with a Google Play-like digital media store. It’s worth noting that Samsung is also one of the most popular sellers of Android-based mobile devices. All that said, plenty of other platforms/devices offer far more than the Nexus Q.

We’ll be sending our Q-ball (haha, see what we did there?!) off to Tom shortly for further review, but so far, our conclusion is that this little fella still has a long way to go.

Google announced some new features planned for its media-focused Google TV platform at its annual Google I/O conference yesterday that should make users pretty happy.

Later this summer, the company will roll out more support for its digital media Google Play store, allowing you to find movies, TV shows, musics, and apps. You’ll also be able to make purchases directly from the store, which is a nice addition — especially if you’ve cut your cable cord. Traditional TV service providers usually have a library of newer movies and TV shows available for rental directly from the cable box, and now you can pretty much do the same on Google TV.

The company is also working with new hardware partners on next-generation Google TV devices, including Sony’s new $199 set-top box, Vizio’s ambitious Co-Star puck, and newly announced GTV-enabled LG television set, with more partners to be announced soon.

But probably the biggest announcement coming out to Google I/O was the planned addition of more support for second-screen Android devices via Google TV. Essentially, this means GTV users are going to get their very own version of Apple TV’s Airplay functionality baked into each app. That’s cool, but it sure make’s Google’s new Nexus Q media streamer look unnecessary.

And the overall announcements the company made about Google TV at the event seem a bit sparse. Google has been hyping its media platform for a while now, and many people expected to hear some big changes for Google TV’s future. However, Google TV barely got a mention during either of the two keynotes at Google I/O.

Image via Sony

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Larry Page has lost his voice — literally, and perhaps figuratively too. At Google’s I/O conference, the company’s yearly event for major product reveals, it was the Sergey Brin show.

Brin, the Google co-founder who no longer runs the company but directs its special products, has been parading around the Moscone center in too-cool-for-you Google Glass wear for two days now. (Meanwhile, Page, the company’s chief executive, was nowhere in evidence, which the company officially attributed to having lost his voice.) Brin’s over-the-top, outrageous demonstration of Glass Wednesday included Google Glass-wearing skydivers parachuting onto the roof of the Moscone Center, while the whole thing was displayed in real time on the Moscone video screens. It may have been one of the most stunning tech demos ever, but it also upstaged Google’s other announcements, which included a new Android operating system called Jelly Bean, Google’s first tablet in the Nexus 7, the Nexus Q media player, and improvements to the often ridiculed Google+ social network.

In fact, when Brin walked on to the stage wearing a pair of the glasses, he interrupted Google senior vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra’s talk on the launch of Google+ Events. At that moment, it was if no one in the room or nothing else announced prior mattered in the slightest. The crowd was arrested by the quirky genius, captivated by the airship skydive, and awed by the entire spectacle.

The hoots, hollers, and deafening applause said it all: this is Sergey’s world and we’re all just living in it.

“Wait, they announced a tablet?” Jason Buscema, a tech enthusiast following the drama via live stream, tweeted at me shortly after the demonstration. “That PR stunt was nuts.”

Buscema’s tweet echoed my own thoughts on the matter. I too was mesmerized by the Glass-to-Hangout sky-high demo, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that Brin, in wanting the world to appreciate his pet project, let Glass outshine the Nexus 7, a fabulous device with the potential to unseat the Kindle Fire as the second-most popular tablet on the market.

Source: Google I/O livestream

Brin awes the crowd at I/O

Worse still, when Gundotra returned to his interrupted Google+ talk to show us a video of the new Events feature, the immediate juxtaposition of the two products made the social network seem small, devoid of originality, and lost in a sea of also-rans. Against the untouchable luster of Glass, Google+ just couldn’t shine.

But maybe there’s good reason for all fanfare around Brin and Glass. It’s been suggested that Glass is the future of Google. The argument is credible. Should Glass live up to its potential, the device has the potential to change how we interface with the world around us, and how we think about mobile devices. Glass could also usher in the next generation of the social network.

“It’s pretty clear that Glass has been and continues to be one of Sergey’s pet projects,” Altimeter Group mobile analyst Chris Silva told me. “I think that is the reason it got as much airtime as it did.”

“The Glass demo was the best all-around demo for technology I have seen in my 22 years in high tech,” Moor Insights & Strategy president and principal analyst Patrick Moorhead told me. Moorhead also likened Brin to superhero Tony Stark, otherwise known as Iron Man.

“Google’s audacity to broadcast live from Glass, jumping from a blimp, landing on a building, rappelling down the building and BMXing into the building will be talked about for a long time. It absolutely upstaged the tablet news,” Moorhead said.

The message that Brin sent, intentional or not, said Silva, is that one can drone on and on about Google+ and how great the features are, but if nobody’s using it, it doesn’t matter. The bumping of G+ for Glass, he said, was like Brin saying, “here’s something that does matter.”

Glass, Silva added, is the most exciting thing that Google has announced. “The natural extension of Google Glass is Google+. It’s a way to connect Glass to all the other people in your life, and all the other places you want to keep and store information,” he said.

“When that type of omnipresent wearable computing becomes commonplace, you’re going to be looking to whomever provides that experience to give you a place to plug it into,” Silva added. “Glass, as a mass market product at a price point most people can afford, and tied to a social network of really beautiful apps for sharing — that’s what going to be a game-changer.”

Brin may have pushed his luck a bit by repeating the Glass demo on day 2, as seemed to be the consensus here, but the superfluous display was a reminder to us all that Brin is running the show — and dictating our future in the process.

Top photo credit: Chris Chabot/Google

Compute Engine is the newest kid on Google’s block of cloud products. It sits in the same suite as App Engine, Big Query, and other products that allow Google to make money on what it does best: big, hairy server/data center work.

We just sat down for a lovely chat with Urs Hölzle (pictured), Google’s senior vice president of infrastructure, who presented Compute Engine to a thrilled audience of developers today at Google I/O.

First things first, we asked him how Compute Engine fits into Google’s other cloud offerings.

“What’s the difference between a platform and an infrastructure? Nobody knows,” Hölzle quipped, quickly adding that while App Engine and Big Query allow developers a lot of convenience, Compute Engine allows them to get closer to the metal, meaning they can see better performance for large-scale computational tasks.

For example, in his onstage demo, Hölzle showed Compute Engine crunching human genome data to find associations between chromosomes. It took Compute Engine seconds or fractions of a second to perform tasks that used to take 10 minutes. “That’s what happens when you have 10,000 cores working on it…. There are 771,886 cores available to the app right now,” he said during the demo.

“That is how infrastructure as a service is supposed to work.”

In our offstage talk, he said of that particular party trick, “No one’s demonstrated anything even remotely close to what we showed in our live demo today. That speaks for the quality of the underlying infrastructure…. Performance was the first thing our beta customers commented on.”

He continued to say that at least some of that performance is due to the fact that the developers are much closer to the hardware. Part of Compute Engine is that the developer has the duty or ability, depending on your perspective, of certain administrative tasks not within the grasp of an App Engine customer.

“These other things [Google's other cloud services] are more like services,” Hölzle said. “We do a lot of the [sysadmin] work for you…. It’s not like one or the other is better, they’re just different tools.”

Compute Engine, while it is intended for use by customers with some experience in cloud computing, is well suited to any number of tasks. “Infrastructure, because it is so low level, there’s really no intrinsic bias toward one workload or another,” Hölzle said.

Right now, Compute Engine is being used for big-data crunching, large-scale computations, like video transcoding, but Hölzle said the service is valuable for anyone needing a high level of performance, scale, and consistency.

He also said Compute Engine’s cost savings were a draw. “We have seen beta customers that spent up to 50 percent less than [with] their equivalent setup with another cloud provider,” he said.

These are big claims to make, and claims that any cloud services provider would make: We’re big. We’re stable. We’re cheap.

But Hölzle, who was one of the search giant’s first ten employees, backs up Google’s particular claims with an interesting anecdote.

“Search is such a computationally intensive job,” he said. “From the beginning, the biggest problem in the first two years at Google was scale…. When I started, [Google web search] was university code. A search at noon on a Monday would not work.”

So his first task at Google was really figuring out how to build an infrastructure that would allow Google’s nascent web search service to scale.

“We also had to deal with cost,” he said. “Our monetization back then was not high, and a lot of our products are free. If you don’t make sure that the infrastructure costs a fraction of the low revenue per user, you’re in trouble.

“It’s natural, it’s easy for us to do well for an external offering because we are familiar with these topics from the last century…. This is the externalization of what we’ve been working on for a long time.”

Google Compute Engine is available now for a limited audience. Currently, Google is seeking customers that would need to use 100 or more virtual machines. General availability will roll out, well, later, “depending on how well it’s going,” Hölzle said.

---

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.

---

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

What a difference a year makes. Instead of insinuating that it was eating Apple for lunch, Google this year sent a message to consumers, developers, and the media at its Google I/O conference this week that its appetite for mobile is so ravenous that it’s willing to dine at Apple’s table.

Google revealed across two days of keynotes that three of its flagship Google applications — Drive, Chrome, and Google+ — are arriving on iOS. Google’s mobile Chrome browser and its Drive cloud-document center landed on iOS today. Google+ is coming soon for iPad, senior vice president of engineering Vic Gundotra said yesterday.

No biggie, right? Wrong. Though Google would likely tell you that its mobile aspirations are platform-agnostic — the company declined the opportunity to chat with me about its iOS strategy — this reporter, along with analysts and attendees VentureBeat talked to, noticed a perceptible about-face.

“It’s a huge tone shift from last year,” developer and This Week in Google host Gina Trapani told me. “Last year, it was a picture of Android eating Apple,” she said, adding that the message to developer attendees was: Look at how great we are. “This year it was the promise of coming to the iPad.”

Here’s some proof: Google’s applications for Apple’s mobile devices were given ample demo time during the company’s two keynotes Wednesday and Thursday. Gundotra, in a moment that exemplified the shift Trapani spoke of, said Wednesday that the Google+ application looked “gorgeous” on the retina display of Apple’s latest iPad. It was a statement that he didn’t need to make, especially during the same event that birthed Google’s Nexus 7 tablet, and yet he said it.

“It was an acknowledgement that people love iOS,” Trapani said. “I’m really happy to see that they’re getting their best stuff on [Apple's] platform.”

Chris Silva, mobile analyst for Altimeter Group, noticed the nod to iOS as well. “[Google] realizes that … there’s a huge platform that they need to serve in iOS, both in smartphones and in tablets,” he told me.

But Silva also believes there’s something more to Google’s iOS love. Instead of just giving a nod to a competitor’s beloved platform, Google, he thinks, hopes to hook Apple-lovers on its own hardware.

“There’s probably a lot of investment being made so that they can tempt people over to the Android side of the fence by having rich application experiences,” Silva said. “You could argue that what we saw today in browsing is head and shoulders above what anyone else is offering in mobile browsing. Once I start using Chrome on my laptop, and then on my tablet, and then on my smartphone, the barrier to entry for Android goes down quite significantly.”

Perhaps, then, what we’ve just witnessed is a Trojan-horse strategy. Google looks to dine with its enemy in peace but is really crafting an attack that will help it eat Apple from the inside out.

Image credit: jay.tong/Flickr

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

Google is bringing its line of Chrome OS-powered Chromebooks to brick-and-mortar retail stores, the company announced today during its Google I/O developers event in San Francisco.

Google first announced that its new line of Chromebooks would be available for pre-order on Best Buy and Amazon’s websites, but today’s announcement means consumers can venture into a physical location to check out the new netbooks. I’m assuming the Chromebooks will be available to play with much in the same way that Apple has traditionally done with its table of products. This is a big deal because Best Buy is currently the largest U.S. retailer, with some serious clout in the mobile tech sector, as previous reports have shown.

Whether or not sales of Chromebooks will increase after people test drive them is another story entirely. They could very well push people away because they’re different and new.

Pricing for the models falls in line with many Windows-7-based netbooks. The computers range from $379.99 to $499.99, as VentureBeat previously reported. The next generation Chromebooks are said to be faster and smoother than their predecessors. The Chromebooks are available in stores today in the U.S., while a select number of Dixon stores will carry the product in the U.K.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google announced today that its Google Docs online editor is now available offline (every business person on an airplane just got really excited).

The company revealed the news at its Google I/O conference in San Francisco, Calif.

Google Docs allows teams to collaboratively edit documents and save their versions on top of other people’s contributions without overriding their content. Docs is often used by small businesses and individuals, but has been criticized widely for not being accessible without an Internet connection. Now, people will be able to open documents and add changes while offline, and sync those changes as soon as they enter a Web-friendly zone.

Google project manger Clay Bavor showed off the capability on stage. He opened the editor online, disconnected his laptop from the Internet and continued to edit. He saved the project locally, and as soon as he reconnected to that Google doc, all his updates were automatically pulled from the memory and saved online.

Offline editing puts Google Docs in a position to take on note-taking applications such as Evernote. One major complaint about Evernote is the inability to share notes with others, which Google Docs obviously already enables.

Offline editing is also available for Presentations in Google Docs.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google will soon take on Amazon, Rackspace, and more with its new Compute Engine infrastructure-as-a-service, a new product it introduced today at its annual Google I/O conference.

With Google’s incredible stash of data centers around the world, it makes sense to use some of those data centers to host and store sites and data. It could be an incredibly disruptive product to Amazon Web Services, the reigning king of public cloud infrastructure. Other players like Rackspace, SoftLayer, and Microsoft’s Azure will also be paying close attention as Google reveals more details about the upcoming service.

Compute Engine will provide Linux virtual machines that app developers and businesses can use for hosting, storage, and computational power. For example, as you can see in the photo below, the company spun up an instance with more than 600,000 cores to fire up an app called Genome Explorer from the Institute for Systems Biology.

The service starts today in “limited preview.” Pricing is as follows:

Update: I asked Forrester infrastructure and operations analyst Andrew Reichman for some instant analysis of Google’s big announcement. He writes:

Google certainly has established themselves as one of the few companies in the world with an army of developers that can build massive-scale solutions at low cost and a network of data centers to host it at. This is a huge economic advantage over a firm that intends to buy commercial products and use facilities owned by third parties. Can they execute?

Most of what Google has designed so far has been advertising-driven free services with limited SLAs. That makes IaaS a very different business than their traditional core, but they have the money and the resources to give it a run if they are willing to invest heavily to make their offerings enterprise-class. If I’m Amazon, I’m not quaking in my boots as I have a big lead, but if I’m IBM, HP, or Dell, I’m even more anxious about my ability to get something going in this space, and worried that I might just get leapfrogged.

I’d say that we’re now likely to see a three-way battle of de facto standards between Amazon, Openstack/Rackspace/HP/Dell/IBM, and Google. [There] could be other entrants emerging, but I’d guess that it will settle into a relatively small number of options in time.

Chrome is one of Google’s biggest success stories. Rank it up there with search that doesn’t suck (hard to find back in the day) and AdWords (the print-your-own money machine that drives everything else Google does).

Today at Google I/O Sundar Picahi, senior VP of Chrome and apps, says that Chrome is not only the most popular browser in the world, it’s now in active use by 310 million people.

That’s double last year’s numbers and astonishing growth, pushing past Microsoft’s Internet Explorer earlier this year.

And he shared a few fun numbers too: 60 billion words typed on Chrome every single day, and one terabyte of data download via the browser each and every day.

Just yesterday, the mobile version of Chrome came out of beta.

Google I/O, on Chrome:

The company announced the latest version of Android, Jelly Bean. (I was hoping J would stand for jalebi; maybe us Indians can get K for kulfi.) Google also announced a Nexus tablet, the Nexus 7, and a music and video streaming device, the Nexus Q.

Here’s my look at the risk impact from Google’s announcements on various competitors’ products:

Apple — Moderate. Although the Jelly Bean OS upgrade has some nice enhancements, nothing here is going to move the iPhone faithful over to Android. iPad has a similar stickiness to it. But a well-designed tablet (as the Nexus 7 seems to be) for less than half the price of the cheapest iPad will surely sway some people who were contemplating a tablet purchase.

Microsoft Surface — Moderate. Microsoft, a company with a reputation for vaporware, announced a tablet without a price or a ship date. Press at the launch event weren’t allowed to use the device. Google announced a price and ship date and gives away tablets to everyone in attendance. Fortunately for Microsoft, many enterprises are stuck with legacy systems that need Microsoft OSes. I can see consumers flocking to the Nexus 7, but I don’t see that happening for Surface. (Disclosure: I am long Microsoft. Maybe I shouldn’t be.)

Amazon Kindle Fire — High. Nexus 7 seems aimed squarely at the Kindle Fire. It’s all about content consumption. It has a similar form factor and price. The Nexus 7 is more elegant and noticeably lighter than the current Fire. We’ll have to revisit this when the updated Fire is announced; that’s expected to happen in July.

Facebook — Low. Google+ Events is the biggest threat item to Facebook. It’s possible that the “party mode” feature that automatically uploads photos to Google+ will cause users to shift their photo sharing activity to Google. That doesn’t seem very likely, though. Although photo sharing is what drove Facebook’s virality, that was at a different point in the social adoption curve. As much as Google touted the elegance of the invitations, having easy access to the people to send the invitations to is more important. The bigger threat to Facebook would be if Google started using interactions via phone calls, text messages, and IM to develop its own social graph automatically. The metrics that Google shared regarding Google+’s “success” were not only highly misleading, they were unimpressive, even if taken at face value. (Disclosure: I have various short positions against Facebook.)

Yelp — High. With the new search on Jelly Bean, Google is burying organic search results for certain local queries and instead highlighting reviews from Google properties such as Zagat in its cards. (In essence, this is the inverse of what Apple is doing with Siri, where Yelp results are being highlighted.) This creates a better consumer experience, but won’t help Yelp. Google also expanded its places API to allow third-party developers to access Google reviews.

Shazam — High. Shazam’s app is best known for a feature that can identify a song that’s playing. Google built that into Jelly Bean, eliminating the need for a separate app.

Flipboard and Pulse — Moderate. Google is building elegant news reading functionality into its apps and tablets. This would reduce the need for third-party apps. Pulse is also a pre-install on the Kindle Fire, which has Nexus 7 as a big competitive threat.

Sonos — Low. Google’s Nexus Q orb-shaped media streamer competes with Sonos’s music system in many ways. But there are so many bizarre design decisions with Q that I find it hard to believe it will convince anyone who was thinking of Sonos to switch. For the same $299 as the Nexus Q, you can get a Sonos Play:3, which includes speakers and will work with iOS and Android devices as well as PCs.

LG, Sony, and Vizio — High. OEMs that have partnered with Google for Google TV must be doing a big “WTF?” in response to Nexus Q. Although the products have different capabilities, the Nexus Q release raises serious questions about Google’s commitment to OEMs, just as Microsoft’s announcement of Surface did. Most people aren’t going to have multiple connected devices in their living room. The Q creates a lot of confusion in the marketplace … confusion that may lead people to buy a Roku or Apple TV instead.

Roku — Low. Roku is Silicon Valley’s little engine that could. They make a great, easy-to-use device at an impulse-buy price. At $299, Nexus Q is too expensive to be a meaningful threat. The varied interfaces among the different Google TV devices take away some of the potential of that platform.

Telenav — High. Apple kicked Telenav in the teeth a few weeks ago by announcing turn-by-turn directions for iPhone. Now Google is eliminating what little reason Android users had left to use the app by automatically generating directions and traffic estimates with Jelly Bean. Some of Jelly Bean’s features are reminiscent of features in Telenav’s Scout app, only they seem to be better executed. (Disclosure: my former boss is an executive at Telenav.)

And that was just day one. Overall, there were some great announcements … and some head scratchers.

Let’s see who Google decides to take on today.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Listen up, Galaxy Nexus owners. You can now get your hands on the developer preview of Android 4.1 Jelly Bean well before its official mid-July debut. But you should also be prepared to do some risky things to get the software early.

The OS has been leaked by the folks at RootzWiki, who managed to snag the early Jelly Bean build sent to Google I/O attendees yesterday and put it online. There are currently ROMs for the GSM Galaxy Nexus and the Verizon version of the phone (with full LTE capabilities).

As always, you should be careful when installing leaked software like this. Since it’s a preview build, there may be bugs and other issues, and RootzWiki’s process of snagging and packaging the OS may lead to other issues. You’ll also have to root your Galaxy Nexus to install the leaked software — so if you’re uncomfortable with that process, or not sure what “rooting” actually means, I suggest holding off until the official Android 4.1 release.

Google officially unveiled Jelly Bean yesterday at the Google I/O developers conference. The update adds a slew of visual improvements to Android, as well as Siri-like voice search capabilities, including a new semi-self-aware feature called Google Now.

Via The Verge

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

Today, Google announced its slick-looking media streamer the Nexus Q, which allows people to share the digital media from their Android devices on a television. This is a feature that Apple began offering nearly a year ago via the Apple TV, but for some reason Google thought it would be a great idea to create an entire device for it that only works with Android-based smartphones and tablets.

I suspect this will prove to be an awful decision on Google’s part for a number of reasons.

First of all, a number of competitors already offer this streaming functionality — and as a complimentary feature. The Apple TV’s Airplay enables TV screen sharing in addition to its support for several third-party media services like Netflix, YouTube, Vimeo, MLB, NHL, and more. And with the purchase of cloud-media startup mSpot, Samsung is also planning to offer this kind of functionality on all its devices, complete with a Google Play-like digital media store. It’s worth noting that Samsung is also one of the most popular sellers of Android-based mobile devices. All that said, plenty of other platforms/devices offer far more than the Nexus Q.

Secondly, Google already has a streaming media platform in Google TV, which it’s fighting hard to gain support for among both consumers and developers. The Nexus Q’s functionality should have been a complimentary feature on the Google TV platform, which would make it more competitive with Apple TV. As it stands, Google TV doesn’t allow for this kind of screen-sharing “Airplay-like” functionality.

And finally, I don’t see the majority of people running out to spend $300 on a TRON-like Poké Ball for digital media — especially when cheaper alternatives exist. The Apple TV, like the Nexus Q, requires the use of mobile devices on its platform to enable the Airplay feature. However, the Apple TV is also $200 less expensive. For the more tech-savvy bunch, you can spend even less to get the Nexus Q’s functionality. A Roku LT costs just $49 and has support for digital streaming service Plex.

I’m not saying that the Nexus Q is worthless, because it’s obviously not. Being able to share the digital media on my mobile devices via television — while others are doing the same — is a pretty cool concept. And the design is actually really awesome. I’m assuming Google went with a sphere-shape for the Nexus Q to keep its Google TV hardware partners from getting nervous. But instead, those same partners are probably wondering why Google is holding out on them by not giving Google TV “Airplay-like” functionality.

Regardless of how the Nexus Q fares in the market, Google is unlikely to abandon its plans anytime soon. We first heard rumblings of a Google-branded streaming box back in February, thanks to a FCC document Google filed. The device was expected to be specific to music and audio streaming at the time, but clearly the company’s ambitions were much higher.

It’s unknown if Google will allow its Nexus Q to also stream/screen-share with Android apps or other third-party services on Android-based devices. Currently, the Nexus Q only offers support for Google Play media. I’m guessing that probably won’t change, but we’ll have to wait and see.

Will you be buying a Nexus Q when it goes on sale? Let us know in the comments.

Public transit data, a key piece of the Google Maps experience, will soon find its way into third-party applications as the map-making experts at Google have just added transit to its Maps API.

Now developers plugging Google’s Maps product into their web and mobile applications can provide their users with public transit routes, color-coded transit layers, and schedules, Google Maps API product manager Thor Mitchell announced during a session at Google I/O Wednesday. Transit routes will include the number of stops, direction of travel, and type of vehicle.

The update further pits Google against Apple on the mapping front, and it provides iOS developers with one very compelling reason to choose Google when picking a maps provider. Earlier this month, Apple announced that it was replacing Google Maps in iOS 6 with its own mapping technology, but its system lacks the transit information that may maps users have come to rely on.

Brian McClendon, vice president of Google Maps and Google Earth, said that more than 800,000 developers work with the Google Maps API.

Also new to the Maps API today, Mitchell revealed, are symbols. These symbols enable developers to add their own markers — in whatever shapes and forms they desire, be it dots, stars, arrowheads, or the like — to maps.

“The goal of the Maps API is about you, your data, your stories,” Mitchell said to the room full of developers.

The updates come as Google Maps, the one-time obvious pick for mapping software, is being forced to cede territory on Apple devices and losing favor with popular app makers as they switch to OpenStreetMaps.

Google Maps covers 75 percent of the world, includes street view imagery spanning 5 million miles, and offers driving directions in 187 countries for a total of 26 million miles of roads. The product’s comprehensiveness, especially when it comes to walking and transit directions, will keep it a long-term leader, Altimeter Group mobile analyst Chris Silva told VentureBeat.

“What Google gives up from not being on Apple devices, it will make up elsewhere,” Silva said.

---

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.

---

During today’s stunt-filled Google Glass demo, I found myself inexplicably perturbed — even profoundly depressed.

The charismatic Sergey Brin sprinted onstage at Google I/O, wearing the futuristic device; he was joined by extreme sportsters and a redheaded product lead who looked every inch the 24th-century power-creative. Together, they showed the possibilities offered by Glass: constant connectivity, a human’s-eye view of every aspect of life, sharing without ceasing.

The crowd of nerdcore developers and press exploded in applause at every interval. They were eating it up.

I felt like a curmudgeon sitting just a few rows from the stage with my arms crossed and a frown creased into my face. But I also didn’t feel like cheering.

The Internet loves to call me a Luddite; to the extent a tech blogger can be a Luddite, this might be somewhat true. I only carry a feature phone. I’ve given up on smartphones, and I don’t use a tablet. While I live in a fully wired castle of technology, I like to get offline as much as possible. But I still use the web and web-connected devices every day, to do my job, to enjoy movies, to listen to music. I love technology as a means to an end, the end being a full and happy life.

But this Google Glass bit gives me pause. What Brin et al. showcased was the ability to pretty much lifecast à la iJustine and that ilk of early Web 2.0 pseudo-cyborgs. It’s all social, and it’s all about sharing.

But I’m concerned that, more and more, we tech-obsessed few are starting to share without asking why we’re sharing in the first place. Everything from our food to our kids to our locations gets plastered onto the web, even though there’s very little impetus to do so aside from vanity. We’re sharing for sharing’s sake, and I would have thought it might have grown a little stale by now.

For some of us, we’re convinced our Instagram snaps and Twitter quips are an art form, that our very special self-expression is unique, witty, and brimming with creative value.

But in reality, very few of us are the Oscar Wilde or the Georgia O’Keefe of the digital age. We’re spewing wave upon wave of drivel into the ether, convinced that our sharing has some moral merit.

Still others insist that their streams keep them in touch with family and friends. This argument — and one of the more powerful use cases demonstrated for Google Glass this morning — is more difficult to dismiss.

Yet are even our friends and family to be subjected to this constant barrage of updates, pictures, and statuses? Even a new baby can be overexposed by a boasting mother; even your closest friends don’t really freaking care what you ate for breakfast.

For every conscientious, conservative user of social media, there are 50 other poseurs, oversharers, humble-braggarts. And if we spend as much time consuming as we spend creating this content, we’re taking an awful lot of time to be social, to parade our own vanity and absorb the self-fascination of our connections.

After watching many of my peers over the years become more and more attached to their smartphones, to their services, to the thoughts and opinions of others, I’m concerned that we techsters are becoming so social that we’re starting to lose our sense of individuality and ability to think and function independently.

Of course, the really interesting use cases for Glass haven’t been shown yet and have little to do with broadcast. These use cases go beyond sharing and allow for retrieval of valuable, possibly non-social information.

But Glass as it was shown today is another disturbing step toward an all-social, always-on web of connectivity that isn’t a means to an end as much as it is a cause in and of itself. It’s the hive mind, and in many ways, it’s already here.

Of course, I’m likely going to pre-order Google Glass, either for my gadget-obsessed partner or for the VentureBeat staff.

After all, resistance is futile.

Photo credit: Chris Chabot/Google

---

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.

---

And we used to make fun of Microsoft for releasing crappy early versions of software, only to get it right later on. As the Google I/O news drowns out everything else in the tech-0-sphere today, Google announced that Chrome for Android is finally out of beta.

The software has just been updated on the Google Play store, at version 18.0.1025123. No, that number is not a joke.

It already has a 4-star rating out of almost 30,000 reviews, so like most Google products that are in beta, the software was already fairly well received.

Building on the familiar Chrome experience of searching and entering URLs in the same area, the beta finalizes new features that were seen as early as February. It’s good timing too, since Firefox just released a strong contender in the browser-for-Android-devices market.

Google says the updated mobile browser has “accelerated page loading, scrolling, and zooming” and automatically syncs with your desktop Chrome browser, so all your tabs, passwords, and bookmarks are identical whether you’re in the office or on the road.

One cool feature: To swipe from one tab to another, simply “flip through tabs the way you would fan a deck of cards.” You can see the effect in the video below.

Early user reviews are good, with some of the following being posted just today in reference to the new update:

David:
Love it — so much better than old stock browser….

Luke:
Best browser – Replaced stock browser on HTC one x, which is already extremely good. Fast, responsive, and excellent use of tabs.

But some are not sold yet:

Nikolas
Decent — lack of fullscreen browsing is still a bummer. I don’t want to burn in the address bar on my Nexus screen.

Here’s your own quick look at what the latest Chrome has to offer:

Don’t use Chrome? Here’s a video of an earlier Chrome beta that will give you a sense of how it works:

Stop the dadgum presses! Googler Louis Gray just told us about a new Google+ feature that you won’t read about anywhere else.

Called Google+ History, this new API will let you add past statuses, updates, purchases, pictures, and more to you personal Google+ timeline from a variety of social and mobile services. These objects are displayed in pretty tiles called “moments.”

This feature wasn’t included in the Google+ update announcements at Google I/O, the company’s developer conference happening this week in San Francisco. But it ties Google+ to existing social networks in some interesting ways, and it may soon have some ties to the just-announced Google+ Events as well.

With History API-enabled apps, you’ll be able to browse through your Google+-linked accounts on a range of social services and apps — Gray mentioned Foursquare and Twitter as examples. You can then pick and choose from past events, images, updates, and checkins, pulling those items into your Google+ profile.

Basically, for users it’s a more or less convenient way for you to beef up your shiny, (relatively) new Google+ profile with rich content from your past and to give your profile a more Facebook-like, comprehensive snapshot of who you are. It’s comparable to similar Facebook Timeline features that allow you to affix earlier dates and location tags to statuses and photos.

For developers, it’s a great way to push your app’s content into the Google+ stream — and with any luck, create a Facebook Timeline-like bump in usage similar to how you’d use Facebook Actions for your app’s structured data.

And while other-network updates can’t yet be tied to Google+ updates and events or grouped together themselves (think of linking a collection of Flickr pictures with a Foursquare checkin, or grouping all updates from an app à la Timeline’s structured-data groupings), don’t be surprised if features like that pop up soon.

You can check out the new API and documentation for yourself. For now, this is API is in developer preview mode. “Take that, puny users, mwahaha,” said a fictional Google rep.

Stay tuned for lots more from Google I/O today — the fun and news are all just getting started.

---

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.

---

Google announced some major milestones as well as some fun new toys for its Google+ social network at the Google I/O developer conference today.

Google+ now has more than 250 million total accounts and more than 150 million monthly active users, Google’s Vic Gundotra announced at the event. More than 50 percent of Google+ users sign in daily, and they also typically spend more than an hour on the site every day.

Google also announced today that Google+ is finally making its way to tablets, starting with Android tablets today and coming soon to the iPad.

The primary Google+ announcement from the main stage today, however, was Google+ Events. Events offers a slick (if you’re used to Facebook Events) invitation feature, a cool (if not too actually useful) “party mode” slideshow featuring pics and videos from the event while it’s in progress, and a comprehensive page for post-event reminiscences.

One thing that wasn’t announced, however, was Google+ History, a feature we learned about from a Googler after today’s keynote had wrapped up. History will allow you to pull in your past updates, statuses, and checkins from other networks to better flesh out your Google+ profile.

Almost exactly one month ago, we saw the launch of Google+ Local, which pulls local business information, ratings, and reviews into the Google search/Google+/Google Places experience.

Around the same time, Google+ for Android got an overhaul that included beautiful new UI elements and the ability to start a video chat Hangout on the go.

And it hasn’t escaped the Mountain View-based mothership that photographers are loving Google+, as well. In fact, they’re one of a few demographics that are truly taking the network by storm. We’ve previously speculated that the search giant is making a bid to overtake Flickr as a photo-sharing destination.

More than its functions as a photo-sharing service or a local recommendations engine, however, Google+ is, as the company sees it, an overarching method that ties together Google’s entire range of consumer products. As we have discussed in the past with Google exec Bradley Horowitz, Google+ was intended to become a unifying login (and a unifying social strategy) for everything from YouTube to Gmail to Reader to Blogger and beyond.

We’ve seen bits and pieces of this unification. For example, the company’s addition of social results to web search was one of its biggest changes in a decade.

What we’re still waiting to see, however, is how Google+ will impact the online world and how engaging it can become, even as its user count continues to climb.

Photo via The Verge

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google co-founder Sergey Brin and his fellow Googlers helped debut the company’s crazy Google Glass project with an employee doing a real-time parachute jump while wearing the connected smart glasses.

For those who haven’t been keeping track, Project Glass’ sci-fi-looking glasses allow a person to do many of the things you do with your smartphone, except without the need of a separate device. Instead, you just wear these slightly dorky-looking glasses that have a heads-up display and a camera built in. In this case, the demo showed that real-time connectivity from someone else’s point of view can help create a breathtaking experience for others.

“We have something special for you,” Brin told the audience. “It’s a little time sensitive. This could go wrong in about 500 ways. Who wants to see a demo of Glass?”

The company then showed off how cool it is to share a real-time experience with others by showing a skydive in real-time. We actually saw the team of skydivers flying down over San Francisco and heading to the Moscone Center where the Google I/O conference is happening. On the screen we were able to see other views as well in a Gooogle+-hangout-like format.

After the skydive, the perspective switched to the team rapelling down Moscone Center and into the building. Pretty crazy all around. (We will post a video of this when it is released.)

When the stunt finished (and our hearts stopped beating), Google spilled new details on Project Glass. The team started working on Glass two and a half years ago. They said the believe in the idea of a companion camera that will always help capture your experiences and make them simpler to share.

Brin said there were three reasons the company wanted to show off what was going on with Glass.

“First, we find it incredibly compelling,” Brin said. “Second is that it’s something we can show you, because you can’t experience it. And third, we’re a pretty small team, and we’ve only had so much time to try functionality.”

Finally, Brin announced that U.S. developers attending the I/O conference could pre-order “Glass Explorer Edition,” an early build of Glass. It will cost $1,500 and will be shipped “early next year.”

Here’s a clip reel from today’s presentation. We will add the real presentation video if Google chooses to release it.

And there’s also a decent video shot before today’s presentation of Google Glass mixed with skydiving below:

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

As Google’s social network service Google+ comes up to its first anniversary, the company is finally ready to launch a native application for its Android OS platform.

“We now have more users engaging with Google+ from mobile than desktop. That’s a significant situation, and we take it seriously,” said Google’s Vic Gundotra on stage at the company’s annual Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco today.

At Google’s I/O conference today, Google unveiled Cloud Messaging, a developer service aimed at improving app performance and decreasing data consumption.

With the move, Google is phasing out the nearly-identical Android Cloud to Device Messaging framework. The new service will be free to developers.

Google says that Cloud Messaging will allow developers tell their apps that there’s new data to be fetched from a server, without fetching the actual data.

In one example, a messaging app can tell a user that she has new messages, which the user can retrieve manually. This cuts down on data transfers and battery drain while still leaving users’ app information up to date.

Cloud Messaging is one of a number of Google developer services Google announced today. Alongside Cloud Messaging, Google also unveiled Smart App Updates, a feature that allows updates to copy over only the new data in an app, instead of re-downloading the entire thing. This not only saves people’s time, but lets them cut down on data costs as well.

Expect lots of developers to implement both new services in future updates.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google announced today that its new Google Now personal assistant feature is available on the latest version of its mobile operating system, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.

The company showed off the new assistant at its Google I/O event in San Francisco. Essentially, this is Google’s answer to Apple’s virtual voice assistant, Siri for iOS, which remembers important dates on your calendar, reminds you of appointment times, and searches the web via voice controls. However, Google Now goes a bit further by taking the data from your daily routine, search history, and other behavior.

For instance, Google Now can learn your daily commute home. If your normal route is clogged with traffic, it sends you a notification suggesting alternate paths. It also updates you on restaurants and stores as you’re walking past them and provides reviews of those businesses and other recommendations.

Siri certainly offers all of these things, but you have to work to see all the same information that Google Now seems to provide in one easy stream. The same is true when you use Google Now to do a voice search. You get very specific search results, along with a stream of useful information related to it.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google’s first branded tablet, the Nexus 7, has made its official debut, following months of speculation and leaks.

Today, Google director of Android product management Hugo Barra unveiled the Nexus 7 to a packed crowd at the company’s annual Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco, Calif.

As anticipated, the Nexus 7 is a Google-branded version of Asus hardware running Jelly Bean software, the latest version of Google’s Android operating system. The slate features a 7-inch IPS display with 1,280 x 800 resolution, a 1.3-GHz Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, 1GB of RAM, a 1.2-megapixel front-facing camera, and nine hours of video playback.

The Nexus 7 retails for $199 (8 GB) and $249 (16 GB) and is available for pre-order today on the Google Play store. The device will begin shipping in mid July.

The tablet, as Barra and Google Play lead Chris Yerga stressed, was designed around Google Play and is intended to make applications work as beautifully possible. The device’s homescreen even features widgets, powered by a recommendations engine, that will make intelligent suggestions for apps, books, movies, and television shows that users may like.

Priced like a smartphone, sized like an e-reader, and packing the power of a full-featured slate, the Nexus 7 offers consumers a hybrid of the two most popular tablet styles on the market. As such, the device, should Google prove successful in bringing top applications over to its Google Play market, has the potential to make a splash in the tablet space and become the number two tablet, second only to the iPad, Altimeter Group mobile industry analyst Chris Silva told VentureBeat.

The tablet, said Silva, can beat Amazon’s competitively priced souped-up e-reader and go head-to-head with the iPad primarily because it will offer consumers an attractive, affordable tablet alternative that’s not just a device for media and content consumption but also a tool for productivity.

“The Nexus 7 resets the bar for a 7-inch tablet,” added Moor Insights & Strategy president and principal analyst Patrick Moorhead. “It is not a stripped down device like Amazon’s Kindle Fire, but full featured with a great Nvidia CPU and GPU, and HD display with full access to the Google Play store.”

The Nexus 7 is also Google‘s answer to the software fragmentation challenge that, in part, is keeping Android-powered tablets built, sold, and marketed by third-party hardware manufacturers from dominating the market.

“Google needs a flagship device to drive penetration of Android,” said Silva. “It’s critical that Google makes some move in the hardware space … that people start to lust after.”

The Nexus 7 is that move.

Not content with tablets and smartphones, Google is taking its Nexus brand to speakers and TV screens with the Nexus Q.

Called the first “social streaming player,” the Nexus Q lets people play music, videos, and YouTube clips from the cloud.

People can collaboratively create social playlists, which they can tweak and edit on the fly from the Google Play app on Android phones and tablets.

Near-field communications, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth are all built in, along with 16GB of storage and 1GB RAM.  The device also functions as a 25-watt amp, so you can use it to power other speakers.

While Google will be talking a lot about Android Jellybean today, the Nexus Q won’t be running on the latest version of Android. Instead, the device will be powered by Android 4.0, aka Ice Cream Sandwich.

Alongside the Nexus Q, Google also unveiled a pair of $399 Triad bookshelf speakers and two $49 speaker cables.

Below is a feature showcasing the Nexus Q’s features:

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Google has just unveiled some fascinating new details on Jelly Bean, the latest version of Android, at Google I/O, the company’s developer conference taking place in San Francisco this week.

The Android maker confirmed the Jelly Bean name earlier this week with a giant jelly bean sculpture at its Mountain View campus.

The launch comes just a couple weeks after the launch of iOS 6, Apple’s new and improved mobile OS at its San Francisco developer conference, WWDC.

In a brief demonstration, Google showed off Jelly Bean’s revamped home screen, which now automatically rearranges icons when you’re moving apps and widgets around. The new OS sports a “refined dictionary” and a predictive keyboard (that’s hopefully better than past Android keyboards). Google is also bringing Voice Typing offline in Jelly Bean, which should be a big plus for dictation junkies.

Jelly Bean’s camera app has also been updated to allow for easier browsing of photos. The interface looks smoother and simpler than the Ice Cream Sandwich camera.

Google detailed the extensive design work that went into Jelly Bean, an initiative the company calls Project Butter. Jelly Bean features triple buffering in the Android graphics pipeline and Vsync, which keeps the frame rate consistent with your device’s display. The result is that just about everything in the new OS looks “buttery smooth.”

As expected, Google also unveiled its own take on Apple’s Siri virtual assistant in Jelly Bean, though it’s spreading those capabilities across the operating system’s search functionality. Now, when you dictate search queries to Android, you can get back specific answers quickly. A Google employee asked “What is the definition of a robot?” and Jelly Bean responded with a helpful dictionary-quality breakdown. Compared to the various iterations of Siri, Google’s robotic assistant voice sounds pretty natural.

Google is also taking the virtual assistant concept a step further with Google Now, a new intelligent search feature. Google Now searches your history, calendar, and other data to figure out your queries. It can figure out your schedule and routines — so, for example, your phone can redirect you around traffic jams in the morning automatically. Google Now also has some advanced functionality, like the capability to book sporting event tickets or a reservation at a restaurant. There’s some strange self-awareness going on with Google Now, so we’re interested to see how much more useful it is than Siri.

Google confirmed that it plans to release Jelly Bean in mid-July to the Galaxy Nexus, Nexus S, and Motorola Xoom tablet.

Jelly Bean’s predecessor was Ice Cream Sandwich, a mobile OS aimed at addressing many of the fragmentation concerns that have long plagued the Android ecosystem. By tailoring Ice Cream Sandwich to run on tablets, smartphones, and other devices, Google hoped to bring some much-needed unity to the ever-growing Android platform.

We’ll be attending a special Jelly Bean-flavored developer session in an hour, so stay tuned for more Android news and details.