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

Check out our highlights from I/O below:

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

That means that yes, at some point you’ll be able to run your little WordPress-powered blog on the biggest server farms on the planet. But it also means that major companies will be able to use Google’s famously reliable services to run their enterprise-scale “big data,” backend, and, yes, consumer web projects, all in the PHP language that that is increasingly penetrating corporations.

I talked to one of the three founding fathers of PHP and current Zend CEO, Andi Gutmans, about the implications for PHP.

It’s a busy time for the Gutmans, the open-source programming language, and Zend, the company Gutmans formed to offer commercial support and tools for PHP. Engine Yard just recently added PHP to their Platform-as-a-Service as well. And Zend is expanding quickly in the enterprise as it has recently released integrated development tools for cloud-enabled mobile applications.

But Gutmans, though busy, is thoroughly upbeat.

And for good reason: The biggest web company on the planet just added support for the most widely used programming language on the planet. And in that support is a massive implied compliment to PHP — the first non-Google programming language to be supported by Google App Engine — and a potentially major boost to Zend’s business.

VentureBeat: Did Google talk to you before adding PHP to Google App Engine?

Source: John Koetsier

Andi Gutmans at ZendCon 2012.

Andi Gutmans: I don’t know how to answer that. I was aware that they were going to make that announcement … I’ve worked with the product manager on the project before.

VentureBeat: Google didn’t formally brief you?

Gutmans: Let’s put it this way: It’s not a surprise that a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) player that’s serious about gaining market share added PHP support. Google App Engine was almost a science project for the first few years, only supporting languages that Google used internally.

But in the past few months, there’s been a real attitude from Google that we’re going to go and compete with Amazon and with Microsoft, and we’re going to do it all fronts. They’ve become very aggressive on differentiating on performance and billing.

VentureBeat: What does this announcement say about PHP?

Gutmans: We have internal jokes about PHP’s web penetration and have used the stat that PHP runs 39 percent of the web because it was the only number we could get from Netcraft.

But I love Google’s stat, that 75 percent of the web runs PHP. No one knows the web better than Google.

If they’re trying to gain market share and gain it quickly, there’s no other language to do it with. And this is the first non-Google language they’re supporting.

VentureBeat: How’s that feel? And how are your customers reacting?

Gutmans: I’m definitely excited about it.

When any player does something like this — especially Google — it’s a huge validation. We got emails from some of our largest customers, saying this is great … it gives our enterprise customers a higher sense of confidence. And that stat that 75 percent of the web runs PHP is great for Zend – anything that is good for PHP, by proxy is good for Zend.

In addition, they said that PHP was their top-requested feature, which means the developer community was very supportive of us.

VentureBeat: Will you offer Google App Engine Support within Zend Studio, so developers can publish to Google right from within their Zend development environment?

Gutmans: We don’t know yet … it’s early and we’re exploring what kind of relationship we can have with Google.

We do support Google Compute Engine — that’s a full integration and some of the larger companies who run PHP already use it — but Google App Engine is just launched, it’s still in experimentation mode.

VentureBeat: What took Google so long to add PHP support?

Gutmans: I can’t speak for Google, but my assumption is that I felt that Google App Engine in the first few years was something they knew they wanted to do really well but … they kinda went down the simple easy route.

But we’ve seen a significant acceleration in the past 12 months. This will be a $20 billion market by 2016, and they moved from testing the waters to being very very aggressive right now.

We recently surveyed 5,000 PHP developers, asking them where in the cloud do you think you’ll deploy. Fifty-one percent said Amazon Web Services, but Google was 21 percent … and we just support Compute Engine right now.

It wasn’t even on the list last year, so that’s a big jump.

VentureBeat: What does this mean for the little guy building in PHP or hosting a WordPress blog?

Gutmans: I think it gives another option for the guys who do the small stuff, who are using shared hosting for $20/month.

What’s really great for the small developer is that it’s a nice value proposition — you can start at a lower cost. And, it’s a modern platform versus shared hosting, which is quite constrained.”

VentureBeat: So what does this mean for PHP overall?

 Gutmans: The number of requests that Google got from developers was very very significant. It exemplifies what we’ve been talking about … that PHP is very broadly adopted, but also by enterprise.

And that is driven by web, mobile, and cloud, which is where PHP’s sweet spot is. We’re seeing a strong tailwind behind us.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

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

Simeon Simeonov is founder of Swoop.

The coverage of Google I/O 2013 developer conference has focused on Google’s plans for world domination through an increasingly more interrelated and stickier set of consumer services. What’s gone unnoticed is Google’s radical developer ecosystem management strategy. The company has made a fateful choice that may leave Google with an exposed flank at a critical time.

Consider the following: in 2012 95 percent of Google’s revenue (a cool $43 billion) came from advertising. Yet, at this year’s Google I/O conference the Google Ads track has only five sessions — a mere 2.5 percent of the conference topics. And the number of sessions related to search advertising, where the majority of Google’s ad revenue comes from? Zero.

Out of curiosity, I checked out the sessions for last year’s I/O conference. It didn’t even have an ads track. If this doesn’t seem surprising to you, think about Apple’s WWDC event not covering OS X and iOS; Microsoft’s Build event ignoring Windows, Office, and Xbox; or Oracle’s OpenWorld event without sessions on databases, middleware, and applications.

The lack of sessions on ads is clearly a strategic decision made at the very top. The unedited version of the pitch goes like this: “Dear developers, please help us grow market share where we don’t make much money: Android, Chrome OS, cloud, apps, social, etc. We are fighting on too many fronts and we can’t win without you. At the same time, please do not concern yourself about all the money we make through advertising. We got that covered. There is nothing for you there, except for maybe paying us to advertise your apps.”

This ballsy move may turn out to be brilliant. Google is fighting a five-front war with Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and web publishers as a whole. By leveraging its tech cool and focusing developers on the key platform battles Google needs to win to extend its control of consumer services and advertising, the company may end up perfectly positioned for the long game. At the same time, Google is taking a big risk by closely and independently managing the advertising portion of its business.

Successful platform companies rely on strong and vibrant vendor ecosystems, whose combined revenues often far exceed the revenue of the platform companies. Microsoft did it by making Windows the dominant desktop OS but staying away from most types of infrastructure and apps for a long time. Oracle did it by creating products that required tons of customization and ongoing service & support. Apple did it by creating market-dominating devices with great developer tools while leaving the apps space wide open. These companies deeply understood the importance of bringing third party developers close to the very core of their revenue engines because developers, while they may be hard to win, tend to stick with what they know. They provide stability and support for platform companies when hard times come.

Some people on the Google Developer Relations team are trying to change things from the inside by associating organizational success metrics to the revenues of Google ecosystem partners. So far they have been unable to convince the powers that be that the financial success of Google partners is worth focusing on.

Google’s developer ecosystem positioning adds to the growing consensus that the company doesn’t like to share where it counts. Its moves to disintermediate publishers in a broad range of user tasks are another prime example. This fact is not lost on some of its large competitors as well as many of its publisher & advertising partners, who’d like to see more innovation and choice. Google may be helping publishers and agencies make billions but there is no deep allegiance there and no real stickiness. There are significant opportunities for startups and investors bold-enough to ignore the “we’ve got it covered” message from Google.

Simeon Simeonov is founder of Swoop, which extends search advertising to content, and Evidon, which brings transparency to online advertising. A lifetime ago  his first startup built the first large web developer community. Sim tweets @simeons and blogs at blog.simeonov.com.

In one of the last I/O sessions for today, the Google Glass team answered some of the community’s most urgent questions about the product, including when the next units are shipping and what apps should come next.

Next recipients

Steve Lee, Glass product director, told the audience that of the I/O attendees from last year, everyone who signed up for Glass has received a unit.

Next, the 8,000 people selected from the #ifihadglass hashtag contest will start getting their devices; that rollout should begin fairly soon.

We still don’t have a date for when Glass will be widely available to normal consumers, so no need to play a Best Buy overnight camp-out just yet.

Next apps

Still, the panel is excited about the apps the developers at I/O will likely go home and build for the devices. Currently, there are fewer than a dozen functioning Glass apps.

“I’d love to have a fitness application on Glass,” said Lee. “That way, I could have relevant information to my workout without ever having to stop my workout.”

Charles Mendis, Glass software engineering director, talked about the hassle of buying groceries with a couple small kids in tow, saying, “I’d love a way to pay easily at the cash register.”

Isabelle Olsson, lead industrial designer for Google Glass, said, “I’m really into karaoke. … If there was a way to sing karaoke in a way that you actually faced the audience, which is usually your drunk friends, that would be awesome. Please make it!”

New features

One developer asked the team when app developers might have access to voice triggers so end users can use voice as a control mechanism for apps other than the Glass device itself.

Mendis responded that more voice commands might be possible in the future. We expect more information will be available when Google releases its Glass Development Kit, which will give devs access to native hardware capabilities.

As for the hardware itself, Olsson got a couple questions about Glass’s colors — currently a limited palette of black, gray, white, orange, and blue.

“We’ve developed five colors based on personalities and also what people look good in,” she said. “We started to see how important color was, how nonintuitive it was and how people develop an attachment to a specific color. … Colors are much more important than you would ever imagine. I want to keep on doing cool colors.”

Normal people

Throughout Google I/O, it’s been a surreal experience to walk through huge crowds of people, a third of whom look like Robocop Lite. It’s also been an interesting exercise in basic manners — knowing when not to take a picture or when to ignore a notification, for example.

“The social etiquette of using Glass has been on the top of our minds,” said Lee, “not just the people who wear them, but the people around them.

“The display is up above the person’s eye. We learned that very early on. Some of the early prototypes actually covered your eyes, and we discovered that a lot of human interaction has to do with eye contact.”

Lee, who is from Idaho, is hopeful about Glass’s chances in the wider market of consumers.

“They are very optimistic and intrigued about Glass,” he said. “There’s already interest, so there’s a real opportunity for Glass to become mainstream.”

Isabelle Olsson, lead industrial designer for Google Glass, showed off a couple pieces of Google history as well as its near future today at Google I/O when she modeled two prototypes.

First, she showed off a huge, clunky early model typical of earlier prototypes of the device:

“I will never forget the first day on the team,” she said. “I walked into a room full of people wearing these crazy things on their heads. … It’s kind of heavy. How do you go from something like this to what we’re all wearing today?”

Three guiding principles in making that gradual evolution, she said, were lightness, simplicity, and scalability.

“We are obsessed with weight” Olsson said. “We care about every single gram.”

She said they also strive to make Glass modular so it can be used in other cases, such as prescription Glass units, which she showed the audience:

At the Google I/O developer conference today, Mary Lou Jepsen bemoaned the lack of hardware innovation in the tech world.

“There’s no more silicon in Silicon Valley. It’s all iPhone apps.

“For the devices we use … the funding models are completely screwed up,” she said. “Angel funding isn’t sufficient for hardware.”

And that’s at least part of why she’s working on a hush-hush hardware project for Google X.

Google X is the division of Google that produced Google Glass. It’s run by Google cofounder Sergei Brin and operates as a skunkworks within the company — a sort of magic factory where ideas are shoot-for-the-moon big and projects are shrouded in secrecy.

Jepsen said she’s not too comfortable with “the sharp elbows and politics of larger companies.” But we’ve heard that Google X operates a bit more like a startup within Google. Her coworkers at X include Android founder Andy Rubin and former Google Maps chief Jeff Huber.

“Google X is the hardware division of Google,” Jepsen said. And while she couldn’t say too much about the hardware followup to Glass, she gave the I/O audience a few clues.

“For me, it all came together in displays,” she said. “How do we get data to all the people of the world, not just the rich people?”

That sentiment alone echoes Google CEO Larry Page’s keynote yesterday, a speech that was all about creating global opportunity and equality through technology. For Jepsen, that principle is the backbone of a huge part of her career, One Laptop Per Child.

Jepsen founded OLPC, designing the first the $100 laptop in the process. “It was just me for the first 18 months, then we grew to the massive size of four,” she said.

Her next move was Pixel Qi, a display company that uses existing manufacturing lines to make screens with vastly lower power consumption needs and increased readability in sunlight.

When it comes to making hardware, she said, “There’s not much competition, so there’s an advantage.” Unfortunately, the competition that does exist is more likely to come in gargantuan form — giants like Samsung and Sony. Her advice: “Don’t do something small.”

She also told the entrepreneur-heavy audience, “VCs don’t have the core competence to fund or even do due diligence on hardware. … You have to be creative to fund it.” While Google’s warchest funds the new projects for Google X, she suggested looking to the more forward-thinking superangels and hackerspaces for resources and funds.

One interesting difference in Jepsen’s entire hardware experience and the modus operandi for Google X/Google Glass is the country of origin for devices. Google Glass is made in the United States; so was Google’s other homebrewed hardware project, the Nexus Q.

Jepsen, on the other hand, has a huge amount of expertise in Asian manufacturing. In fact, she actually moved to Asia and learned Chinese as part of her founder experience for OLPC.

“These days, the manufacturing is controlled by a small number of countries, primarily Taiwan and South Korea,” she said. “You need to figure out how to deal with cultures, but it’s freed me for the last decade .. Basically, all I have to do is get a whole bunch of people to say yes. They say no 99 percent of the time.”

Image credit: Pixel Qi

Timothy Jordan, developer advocate for Glass, takes a small stage in a large anteroom at Moscone West.

“[Glass] is a moonshot about our relationship to technology … technology that’s there when you need it and out of the way when you don’t.”

He’s selling the device, but in this crowd, there’s no need.

Currently, there’s only one way to develop apps for Glass, which Google calls “Glassware”: Using Google’s Mirror API. (Although Google itself is hosting a session on hacking Glass later today — called, appropriately enough, Voiding Your Warranty.) A more full-fledged software development kit (SDK) called the Glass Development Kit is coming, Google says, but hasn’t said when.

That means it’s relatively easy to Glassware now, but until the SDK arrives, it’s challenging to make them look good and work well with users’ expectations.

At this, the very first session for the Google Glass track at I/O, the session room seating a couple hundred developers had filled to capacity a half hour before the session started. Five minutes later, the overflow room (again seating a couple hundred devs) was also full. A hundred or so devs milled around in the hallway outside, queuing for no apparent reason and obviously miffed.

I can’t stress enough how fascinated these people are with Glass. For something that’s still a buggy, crash-prone prototype, it’s inspiring imaginations enough that I can see a nascent ecosystem growing around it long before the first consumer devices ship.

Jordan’s job for today is to guide those imaginations in the best directions. He has to explain the Glass platform and teach web and mobile developers how to design for a tiny screen with new ratios and new paradigms for user-device interaction. He’s not just teaching old dogs new tricks; he’s teaching dogs how to do Shamu’s Sea World routine.

Jordan runs through a Glass demo — how to turn it on, how to take and share a picture. As other writers have mentioned, nothing about the user experience is particularly (or even remotely) intuitive. But once (and if) you get the hang of it, Glass becomes remarkably interesting very quickly. It’s then that you realize the wonderful possibilities of technology that is literally in your face but still somehow out of the way.

So far, Google’s Mirror API is the only way to build Glassware. With the Mirror API, which we’ll talk about more later today, the developer’s service never communicates directly with Glass devices. Instead, the service “talks to” Google services, which sync with the Glass device in question. Devs can use location and subscriptions to make their services more interesting. All this happens with three common technologies: REST, JSON, and OAuth.

There’s no native API yet for accessing the hardware or working offline, but Jordan says this tool, called the Glass Development Kit, is coming soon. The company is soliciting developer wishlists for the GDK now.

Beyond the tech side, there’s the graphic design, UI, and UX. The screen size is more limited than any other modern screen, so what is presented on the display must be drop-dead simple — a photo, a video, some text, or the simplest HTML you can imagine (Google has made a few handy templates to get you started).

What you see on the Google Glass display are called “cards.” They’re more TV-shaped than phone or computer screen-shaped, but even though they’re parked right next to your eyeball, they’re a lot smaller than you might think, and designers have to work carefully to make the most of the tiny screen. Cards can be bundled, threaded, paginated. Jordan calls this ability “super powerful but tricky.”

And while Jordan doesn’t mention it aloud, we’re noticing a trend with the Glass card examples: Most of the cards contain some kind of prompt — otherwise, how will your users know what to do next? They’ve never worked with anything like this before, and they don’t know where to tap or swipe or what to say. There’s no norm yet, so you have to leave a visual breadcrumb trail throughout the entire UI. Jordan does say each prompt or menu item should be just a few characters long, with only a handful of menu items on a single card.

The technology of building for Glass is the easy part. Designing for a totally new interface is the hard part.

“We’re always thinking at Google, what’s good for the user?” says Jordan. “Really understand the design and experience of Glass,” he says, encouraging devs to do whatever they need to do to demo a Glass unit if they don’t already have one.

“The user experience is about design. It’s about making an excellent service for the user… the paradigms and patterns,” he continues. “The essential thing you must do is test Glass and use it in your daily life.” Over and over, Jordan tells the audience they need to test on Glass.

Designing for a device you know and use is Rule Zero of Glass development. The next rule is to not “get in the way.” Then, Jordan says, make sure all content is timely. Finally, he says, “Avoid the unexpected. This is particularly important on Glass … They’re wearing your service. Be honest about the intention of your application, and give them preferences to get notifications at certain times or to know what they’re going to get when they sign up.”

Facebook, Twitter, Path, Evernote, Tumblr, Elle, the New York Times, and CNN already have Glass apps out, and Jordan points to them as great examples of how to start. And of course, he recommends using Google’s own services, like Google+ and Hangouts, on Glass.

Glassware product design is the only big challenge facing developers who want to make apps for Glass. The tech is simple. The users, while few, are low-hanging fruit, willing to test just about anything you throw their way. But as hungry and fascinated as the developers at Moscone West are today, I’m sure they’ll find truly imaginative ways to work around and with Glass’s challenging interface in short order.

Image credit: Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat, Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

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

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

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

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

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

Photo: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

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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Google is making a big push to get game developers on board its ecosystem at its annual I/O developer conference. For game studios, one of its big new products at the event  is Google Play game services, which the company announced during its keynote presentation earlier today.

Google Play game services is an ecosystem that developers can tap into to provide cloud saves, achievements, leaderboards, and multiplayer to mobile games. One of the most interesting aspects is that Google isn’t just enabling this technology for Android — Play game services also works on Apple’s iOS.

During a session with Google’s leaders on the project, the company explained why it wants the services to work on iOS.

“We want the whole world to play together,” Google developer advocate Todd Kerpelman said. “I know that’s a little bit touchy-feely — kids holding hands around the world — but at the core level, it’s really true. All of us on the team are gamers. By that I don’t mean that we just play games — we haven’t had a lot of time lately — it’s more that we understand that games are powerful.”

Google’s intent with these new services isn’t just enabling players to pick up a game on their PC that they left off on an iPad. It wants thsoe on one platform to play against another without any hassle.

“There are a lot of people who own and play games on Android devices. Likewise, there are a lot of people who own and play games on other types of devices,” Android lead engineer Steve Martin said. “Our goal is to enable everyone to play with who they want and not just with people who own a certain type of device. “

This technology is powered by a special kind of API that is accessible by any connected device. Martin said they don’t want to exclude any piece of hardware. That means phones and tablets but also Macs and PCs.

“Games can push technology forward,” said Kerpelman. “They drive platform adoption. They fulfill human needs in a way a spreadsheet just can’t.”

Likewise Google is probably hoping that Play game services fulfills developer needs in a way that Apple’s GameCenter competition just can’t.

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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

Tickets On Sale Now

Add one more Google announcement to the large pile that’s been accumulating all day from the company’s Google I/O conference. Today YouTube announced that it’s rolling out livestreaming to many of its channel partners.

If you’re thinking that YouTube just became equal to Ustream, then think again. The livestreaming feature is only available for channels that are in good standing and have at least 1,000 subscribers. That seems like a fairly reasonable set of stipulations since the resources for livestreaming a video broadcast is more expensive than uploading them for people to watch at their own convenience. Hopefully, this will also cut down on the amount of needless livestreams that pop up, allowing you to sift through only the good stuff.

Here’s some of the key features of the new livestreaming service from the site’s creator blog:

• You get real-time transcoding in the cloud, so you only need to send us your highest quality stream and we make it instantly available in all resolutions and device formats
• You can show multiple camera angles, add closed captions, and insert ads and slates
• Viewers can watch the live stream from any device, get the best quality constantly adjusting to their Internet connection, and can skip back and forth in the live stream

And of course since the I/O conference is in full swing, YouTube is providing developers with a YouTube Live API, which presumably we’ll hear more about during YouTube’s session tomorrow. Users can check the Account Features page to see if their channel is eligible for livestreaming.

Photo via Korosirego/Flickr

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Larry Page is feeling sentimental. The Google chief executive delivered a heartstring-pulling speech today at the I/O conference in which he spoke about the intersection of technology, humanity, and, of course, Google.

It’s obvious that technology built this man’s life.

Page successfully delivered what should be the end to the era of Steve Jobs-esque inspiring keynotes. He’s filled with hope for technology’s future, saying we’ve only hit about 1 percent of what we’re capable of producing.

He opened the talk by recalling a time his father took him on a road trip to a robotics conference, getting him in even though Page was under the admitting age. He explained that we’ve got a barrier to entry for youngsters. Young people aren’t interested in computer sciences, and that is a scary thought. He urged people to get children involved in engineering, math, and sciences.

But Page is also “sad.” Our technology is failing us, in his eyes. The web hasn’t done enough, though technology itself is booming. For Page, it’s about building a generation that will build life-altering tools. Tools that will change not just the way we watch TV but also the way we live our lives. The way we spend our days.

“Technology should do the hard work, so people can get on with the things that make them happiest in life,” he said at Google I/O. “People are starving in the world, not because we don’t have enough food, but because we’re not organized. And computers are part of that. … Farming is great if that’s what you want to do, but not if that’s what you have to do.”

He says he’s uninterested in the stories about Google versus other companies (of course, everyone’s thinking Apple). Instead, he’s focused on building “things that don’t exist.” To him, the “important things aren’t zero-sum.” An example of one of these big visions is giving people’s commuting time back through self-driving cars.

He explained that technologies need a safe place to experiment, that technology is stunted by regulatory and legislative barriers.

“Many of our laws can’t keep up with the pace of change in technology. … Maybe more of us need to go into other areas, and in those areas, improve and understand technology,” he said, “We had Google Health, and we didn’t make that much progress with it. The primary obstacle was regulatory.”

But all in all, Page doesn’t actually seem bitter. He seems hopeful. Maybe it was his raspy voice or his musings about technology replacing the labor so we can do what we enjoy, but it seems Page may have just become tech’s richest hippie.

Larry Page image via Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Normally, when a company claims that it’s bringing the helpfulness of a Federation starship’s onboard computer to everyday technology, I sort of roll my eyes and prepare to be disappointed — except this time, that didn’t really happen.

Today, Google demonstrated its new conversational search feature during its annual Google I/O developers conference. Conversational search basically means that you’re asking questions rather than strategically typing in search terms to get the answer you want from a query, something that’s been available on Android mobile devices and Apple (via Siri) for a while now. However, Google is now bringing that conversational search to the desktop. (Check out a demo video below for a better look at voice search.)

To take advantage of this tool, you need to use Google’s Chrome web browser and also have access to a working microphone. From there, you can start by saying “OK, Google…” and proceed to ask it a question or bark out an order. (But beware of barking too harshly in case this new tech is really just the precursor to a future where Cylons take over our planet.)

During the demo, Google’s conversational search was able to pull up travel destinations for a long trip, pull up restaurant data, see flight itineraries, etc. — nothing we haven’t already seen. But what is impressive is how much the voice instructions are actually like talking to someone who had information you need to know. Part of that is in anticipating what the conversation would be and what the person making the query actually wanted to know. Obviously, the technology is getting better, and its far closer to the Enterprise‘s computer than it was when the service first rolled out.

But just because the conversational search is branching out to the desktop doesn’t mean the company isn’t still working to improve the mobile experience. More specifically, the company will be adding plenty of new cards that will appear in its Google Now service, including those for public transit, music album, movies, TV shows, reminders, and books.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Google released a major new education program today that organizes and manages the way teachers push apps, books, and other learning content to student tablets.

Technology changed the way we socialize, find new things to do, get directions, play games, date, work, read news, take pictures, and so much more. But some feel it hasn’t done enough for education. We’ve seen attempts to get new PCs in classrooms, and now there’s a big push for tablets in the hands of every student. But device costs along with theft and content management cause schools to shy away. Google’s Play for Education program may dramatically change all of this.

“When I go visit my kids’ classrooms, it looks pretty much exactly like it did when I went to school,” said Chris Yerga, Google’s engineering director at Google I/O. “Teachers told us that in education, there’s a huge gap between what’s possible with technology and what’s practical, especially with mobile technology. And then they told us it was Google’s job to fix this.”

He explained that teachers said Google should make an affordable Android tablet, content management tools, and app discovery tools. So Google is starting with the last two.

Google Play for Education is like an app store designed especially for teachers with some powerful management tools built-in. Teachers will be able to visit this app store and search by categories such as age-range and subject matter. If you are trying to teach math to a bunch of first graders, you can plug in those refinements and get back a list of apps made specifically for that group.

Teachers will also be able to see reviews from other teachers. After instructors select an app, Google Play for Education will push it out automatically to all the tablets associated with a defined Google Group of students.

That’s the catch — you’ll need to set up your entire classroom on Google Apps, buy Android tablets for all the students, and create a Google Group with the tablets hooked up. The only real issue here might be cost, as Google Apps are fairly easy to set up and many education institutions are already using them.

Schools are able to load accounts with funds for the app store, so a teacher can automatically deduct from that balance if they wish to license a classroom-amount of paid apps. Teachers will also be able to push out YouTube videos and books in the same way they do apps.

Apple over the last year has put a lot of emphasis on the role of iPads in schools. It has tested a number of different markets, and developers have created some very beautiful apps for interactive books and other learning software. But the program is lacking structure and, of course, iPads are also cost prohibitive for many schools.

Google Play for Education could have the right kind of management capabilities to make Apple step up its game, but only if it’s actually as easy to use as it seems.

The program will be available this fall, but app developers can start submitting apps by this summer.

Educators, we would love to hear your thoughts on whether Google Play for Educations is what you wanted from Google. Send us an e-mail!

Chris Yerda image via Google I/O livestream

I don’t use Google + and chances are you don’t, either. Google, however, really, really wants to change that.

Google is rolling out a major overhaul to the design of Google+, which now looks like a freakish three-column lovechild between Pinterest and Facebook.

The updates, which are among the 42 new features that are headed to Google+, adds a lot of polish to a social network that has so very been awfully bereft of it. I can only applaud Google’s decision to change things up.

In addition, Google+ will now automatically tag your photos, which is either horrifying or awesome, depending on how you look at it. During the presentation, Google senior VP Vic Gundotra used the example of a photo of the Effiel Tower, which, after being analyzed, was tagged with, um, #effieltower.

“We are incredibly grateful to the millions of you who’ve joined Google+, and we can think of no better thank you than to keep innovating,” Gundotra said.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

After months of speculation and rumors, Google finally announced its own streaming music service called Google Play Music All Access today at its annual Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco.

“We wanted to build a music service that was focused on music where technology was in the background,” said Google’s Chris Yerga. “Choosing your music shouldn’t be such a chore.”

The new service, which is available today, will be $9.99 per month in the U.S., and will give everyone a free 30-day trial. If you sign up by June 30 you’ll be able to get it for $7.99 per month. Unlike many of its new competitors, it doesn’t look like Google will be offering a free tier of the service, which lines up with rumors that we’ve heard in the past.

The service itself will compete with on-demand music services like Rdio and Spotify as well as Pandora and other smart radio services. The company apparently was able to wrap up negotiations with all the major record labels prior to I/O, but admittedly it is a bit odd that it chose a developer-focused event to make such an announcement. The service will also face plenty of competition from other streaming music services as well as those from rival tech companies that are rumored to be launching their own offering.

“This is radio without rules,” Yerga said.

You can use Google Music All Access to create a radio station from any song you’re currently listening to. It also lets you peer into the future of what’s scheduled to play within that station — and in a move that’s not like any of the other music services, Google will let listeners get rid of music within those stations that they don’t like. The algorithm then changes to fit your revised musical tastes on that selection.

Google already has a streaming music offering in its “Google Music” service, which you can use to upload your entire library of digital songs to the web and play from anywhere (or “pinned” for offline listening on Android devices). That service is also heavily connected the Google Play store that sells music, among other things.

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

Android finally has its answer to iOS’s Game Center.

At the Google I/O conference today in San Francisco, the company announced Google Play game services, a new set of  features that expands what developers can do with their games.

The most notable feature of Google Play game services is that it’s cross-platform, which means it also works on both iOS and the web. Apple (and maybe even console makers such as Microsoft, Nintendo, and Sony) should take note.

Another major feature is support for cloud saves. You can save progress on one device — say, a tablet — and pick up where you left on completely different one.

Google Play game services also supports matchmaking and multiplayer games. But Google’s demo of this functionality failed, so we couldn’t get the best idea of how it looks in action.

This also touts achievements and leaderboards, which are mandatory features for any gaming service these days. Players can see how they rank compared to both friends and the rest of the world. (This, as you might expect, links to back Google+.)

We’ll have more as Google announces it.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Google Play is doing pretty darn well, according to an update at today’s Google I/O developer conference today.

Currently, the Google Play has processed over 48 billion app installs from all the various devices using Android. In the last month alone, the company said it’s seen around 2.5 billion app installs, which is pretty impressive.

As for revenue, Google said it’s paying out more to developers than ever before. Also, revenue per user is 2.5 times what it was a year ago across the globe.

Check out VentureBeat’s liveblog of the Google I/O 2013 conference.

Developing.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

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

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

News announced so far:

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

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

Check out our Google I/O keynote liveblog here.

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

News announced so far:

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

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.

In the days before its big, splashy, Kardashian wedding-level annual developer conference, Google is letting one juicy tidbit escape from its locked-down treasure trove of announcements.

Brace yourselves, now.

It’s mobile recommendations. That is, publishers and developers can use Google+ to fuel a constant stream of recommended content for users of their mobile websites.

Recommendations from Google+ surface bring up content based on what you’re currently reading. It can also recommend more articles by the same author, articles your Google+ friends have shared, or pages that are particularly popular with the general Google+ audience.

Put it all together; whadda ya get?!

For now, this JavaScript snippet-powered feature is for mobile web only. Publishers and developers can specify content for the engine to not recommend.

This is just one of the Google+-themed platform announcements we’ll be hearing more about during I/O throughout this week. The biggest Google+ developer tool released to date has been Google+ sign-in, which is either a companion or competitor to Facebook’s Open Graph login, depending on to whom you’re speaking.

We asked Google+ PM director Seth Sternberg how Google+ sign-in was working out for developers so far — particularly developers using the mechanism to boost their Android app adoption rates.

“Anecdotally, we’ve heard really great things,” the Googler replied. “We wanted to drive more Android installs, and it’s been amazing in terms of user engagement. It’s really sending users back to our partners.”

At I/O, 50 Google partners already using Google+ sign-in will be present to talk about their experiences. The full list of partners presenting is included below:

Air New Zealand, AllTheCooks, Banjo, Branchout, Business Insider, Colopla, Community Factory, Contacts+, Dealflicks, Deezer, Editora Globo, eHow, Fandango, Flixster, Forbes, Funny or Die, Glamour, Go SMS Pro, HRS.com, Huffington Post, ibotta, Jolicloud , Kabam, KickSend, KLM, Magisto, Mashable, mon.ki, n24, NPR, Owners.com, Pixiv, Polygon, RCS, RebelMouse, Restalo.es, SB Nation, SkillPages, Slacker, Softonic, Songza, SoundCloud, Speakingtree, Synacor, Tamindir, Terra, The Fancy, The Guardian, The Verge, TravelZoo, Trovit, TuneIn, Vasily, Verbling, and Voxy

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

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

Tickets On Sale Now

Google’s annual I/O developer’s conference is coming up next week in San Francisco, and 6,000 lucky geeks will be flooding the Moscone Convention Center for all kinds of Google goodness: Chrome, Android, Maps, Ads, and — of course — Google Glass.

But what if you’re not one of the 6,000?

No worries, you can participate too. Google is “going live” from I/O, and pretty much anyone who wants to participate can join in. Here’s how:

1. Keynotes
   Google will stream the major presentations from 9AM to 7PM PST for both May 15 and 16.
2. Interviews with Googlers
   Google Developers Live will feature interviews with Google developers and managers throughout Google I/O.
3. News updates
   The Google Developers Google+ page will have updates (as will we — see below)
4. Full sessions
   And full sessions will be broadcast on the Google Developers YouTube channel. No word from Google on when exactly they’ll go live, but Google says they will be recorded an made “rapidly available.” Hopefully, that will be same-day.

And, of course, we’ll be at Google I/O. Our own intrepid Jolie O’Dell and Devindra Hardawar will be at the event, seeking out the best news and reporting almost-live here on VentureBeat.

Oh, and by the way, if you haven’t been to Google’s I/O home page, give it a click. Then click the “I” and the “O,” and build some binary code at the bottom of the page.

Update: It looks like I/O tickets have sold out in just 49 minutes, almost twice as long as it took last year. We’re checking with Google on whether or not Google Wallet payment processing technical issues may have gummed up the works for some unlucky would-be registrants.

Let me tell y’all something tonight: I got three tickets in 2013 that I care — I mean, really care — about: Beyonce’s summer tour, a drag queen presentation of groundbreaking drag documentary Paris Is Burning at the historic Castro Theatre, and Google I/O.

One of these things is not like the other, right?

But much like the drag-fest, Google I/O will be inspiring, high-energy, and highly anticipated by a niche audience of devoted enthusiasts. And much like the Beyonce show, it’ll sell out within a matter of minutes. Last year, it took less than a half hour.

Tomorrow morning (that’s Wednesday, March 13), Google I/O tickets will go on sale at 7 a.m. Pacific time.

Here’s the link where you can register and buy your Google I/O pass.

You will need:

1. A Google+ account,
2. A Google Wallet account,
3. And $900 in Earth money ($300 if you’re part of the academic community).

Once you start the registration process, your ticket(s) will be held for five minutes while you complete the checkout process. For checkout, you must pay with Wallet.

If you’ve ever bought something with Google Play, you already have a Google Wallet account; just make sure you have up-to-date info for your mailing address and payment information. And if you have any doubts about whether your credit card fraud monitoring will throw a flag on a $900 nerd voucher, you will definitely want to call your credit card company now.

Aside from simply being on the registration page well before 7 a.m., Google offers these tips for would-be registrants:

We’ll take you to a waiting page while we try to find you a ticket. Expect to be on this page for up to six minutes. On this page, don’t refresh your browser or your ticket search will restart.
Please don’t open multiple tabs or use multiple browsers. Each time you open a new connection, your ticket search will restart.

Google I/O will take place May 15-17 in San Francisco.

File under “good to know”: People under 16 years of age may not attend. And new this year, Google is providing nearby child care for children ages six months to 12 years.

So, are you ready?

Amped for this year’s Google I/O conference? Google just announced that registration for its annual developer conference will open on March 13 at 7 a.m. Pacific (10 a.m. Eastern).

Google I/O 2013 is May 15-17 at San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Ticket prices remain the same as last year: $900 for general attendees and $300 for academic attendees.

You need Google+ and Google Wallet accounts ready to register for the event. Last year’s I/O tickets sold out within 20 minutes, so get your magic fingers ready if you’re eager to attend.

At last year’s I/O event, Google announced the Nexus 7, Nexus Q (RIP), and its powerful Compute Engine. The company also showed off the power of Project Glass by livestreaming people jumping out of an airplane.

Google has just announced the dates for I/O, its annual developer conference where all its biggest products and updates are announced. So go ahead and mark your calendars, book your hotels, and buy your plane tickets, because well all be going to Moscone Center on…

010011010110000101111001001000000011000100110101001011010011000100110111001011000010000000110010001100000011000100110011

Bahaha, we slay us! That’s May 15 – 17, 2013, for those of you who don’t do the whole binary thing.

But seriously. Google I/O is one of our favorite events of the year. You get sneak peeks at special APIs, hands-on time with as-yet unreleased gadgets, first looks at new products and services from Google, and truly bizarre demonstrations from megalomanical founders.

It’s the best ticket of the year!

In case you’re still unconvinced, let’s do a quick refresh on what happened at I/O 2012. We had a Death Star-shaped media server called the Nexus Q, a 7-inch tablet, a new smartphone showing off a new Android operating system, a Google-grown challenger to AWS, and the Star Trek-reminiscent Google Glass. Yes, to be sure, by the end of the whole show, we were a bit Googled out, but there’s no better place or time to get your head around everything that Google stands for, hopes for the future, and intends for its products and services.

If you’re too excited to read all that, here’s a video digest:

More details will be announced in February 2013. Stay tuned to DevBeat and Google’s communications channels for updates, information, and tickets.

So far, though, we’re just happy knowing that the “new” date for I/O is in May again. The 2012 conference’s strange, late appearance at the tail end of June really threw our summers for a loop.