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

Check out our highlights from I/O below:

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

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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.

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

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

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

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

Designing to delight on Android

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better design through science

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

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

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

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

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

Is it enough?

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

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

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

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

Photos: Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat: Top image: Google

Google tricked out its entire I/O conference with hundreds of sensors this week. Today, we got a glimpse at some of the data and the work that went into making it happen.

Michael Manoochehri, with Google’s cloud engineering group, explained the project from Google’s perspective: It’s a big experiment designed to help Google figure out how to use its many cloud tools to collect, organize, and analyze large quantities of sensor-driven data.

To pull off the project, Google needed some hardware-hacking experts. So it called on Kipp Bradford, a professor of engineering design and entrepreneurship at Brown University; and Alasdair Allan, a hardware hacker with Babilim Light Industries in the U.K.

The pair designed a sensor module based on the Arduino Leonardo R3 chip, a popular microprocessor that many DIY hobbyists use. Each module, or “mote,” carries a mix of temperature, humidity, noise, and other sensors. Some have air quality monitors that measure the amount of particulates (dust) and volatile gases (from cleaning fluids or alcoholic drinks). Some are connected to floor mats that record footsteps.

The devices send their data via a Zigbee-based mesh network back to Google Data Store, a NoSQL database running on Google’s App Engine. BigQuery, a tool for doing analysis on large datasets that is based on Google’s own internal data analysis tool, “Dremel,” allows the team to perform rapid queries on the enormous dataset (see sidebar for some of the project’s metrics). The team even used the Google Maps API to display data from each sensor on a map of the conference center.

Tableau Software, which held an IPO this week and whose stock is already up 60 percent in its first day of trading, provided real-time visualizations of the data. That’s a Tableau-generated chart at the top.

Bradford and Allan are editors at Make magazine and have done similar work with O’Reilly’s Data Sensing Lab, albeit on a smaller scale. (O’Reilly is the publisher of Make and the organizer of the Maker Faire, coming up this weekend in San Mateo, Calif.) For O’Reilly’s Strata conferences, the Data Sensing Lab build networks of about 50 such devices.

Also helping Bradford and Allan were Julie Steele, a project manager for O’Reilly, and Harry Johnson, a Stanford engineering student who laid out the project’s first circuit board and acted as the project’s “sanity check,” Bradford said.

“When the first prototype came back and it worked, I breathed a huge sigh of relief,” Bradford told me.

Once the team had built several working prototypes and ironed out the kinks, Bradford send the circuit board design to Sunstone, a company in Oregon, which produced hundreds of custom circuit boards. He then arranged to have the boards and various components sent to VR Industries, a company in Rhode Island, which assembled all 525 devices. The per-unit cost was about $120, though that’s with volume discounts figured in (it would cost you more than that to build one or two of these things).

After that, the team spent a nearly-sleepless week configuring and setting up all the devices.

“We basically spent the last week locked in a room at Google Boston doing integration and testing,” Allan said.

For Google, it was a chance to get its hands dirty with real-world data.

“We wanted to understand how this kind of use case could work with the Google Cloud platform,” Manoochehri said.

Did they learn anything about the conference? So far, the takeaways seem pretty obvious. For instance, in the steps-per-minute graph above, there’s a big spike of activity as people lined up to enter the Google I/O keynote on the first day. Then activity settles down as they all sit to watch the presentation. There’s a flurry of activity as people attend the first evening’s party, and the noise level spikes during Billy Idol’s concert. Air quality tends to go down when people are milling about, as they raise dust, and it gradually improves after they go away. Also, a cleaning crew comes through the Moscone Center at 4 a.m. every morning.

The company is making all the hardware, code, and data from the project available freely to the public. The goal is to make it easy for others to use the same kinds of technologies in their own data-gathering projects.

There are already lots of sensors out there. From wristband health and fitness sensors to smart thermostats like Nest to automobile sensors, we are increasingly surrounded by connected sensors. These devices are already collecting a lot of data, and soon will be collecting orders of magnitude more, Manoochehri said.

“This is a really big deal,” Manoochehri said. “So we need to understand this use case, and test that our platform is good for this use case.

“People collect all this data, and they go, ‘Oh my god, what do I do?’”

This project provides an answer to that question — provided you’re willing to use Google’s many cloud services.

Also, if you are looking for the best place to take a nap, check the graph below, which shows Manoohchehri’s “serenity metric,” showing a combination of low average audio noise and low noise variance. Conference rooms in the far corners of the building are your best bet. The least serene location? Apart from Google’s radio-controlled blimps (which carried sensors over the crowd), the second floor escalator was the least serene location.

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.

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If you follow VentureBeat but don’t regularly check our GamesBeat site, here’s a list of the best video game stories we ran over the last seven days that you may have missed.

This week, Google held its annual I/O conference in San Francisco, revealing plans for cross-platform Google Play support, Electronic Arts decides to kill its online pass initiative that forced used game players to pay for multiplayer access, and GamesBeat gets an early look at Naughty Dogs’ upcoming project The Last of Us.

You’ll also find a review for Metro Last light and previews for Scribblenauts Unmasked and The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.

News

• The DeanBeat: Maxthon offers an alternative browser that won’t crash while running multiple games
• DICE L.A. is ’100% focused on Battlefield 4′
• Crytek’s Warface invades Japan under Nexon’s management
• Twisted Metal creator collaborating on new vehicular combat game Autoduel
• EA kills its controversial Online Pass program
• Microsoft phasing out Points system — Xbox market getting real-currency payments
• PlayStation 4 getting Gaijin Entertainment’s military MMO War Thunder
• Trion Worlds’ Rift MMO goes free-to-play in June
• Pokémon X and Y trailer reveals improved visuals and battle animation
• Ace Attorney 5 is coming to the U.S. — but only as a digital download
• Puzzle & Dragons is making $3.75M a day

Google I/O

• 10 Android apps that already use Google Play game services
• ‘Leveling up’ on Google Play Services means enhancing quality and utilizing social networks
• Google Play game services can shut down a pirated Android game
• Why Google Play game services works on iOS
• Google Play game services is a Xbox Live-like mobile network — and offers cross-platform gaming
• Google to launch ‘Google Play Games’ platform services for game developers

Nintendo Direct

• Nintendo brings E3 to the people … well, people who go to Best Buy
• Nintendo dates Platinum Games’ The Wonderful 101
• Nintendo releasing retail version of New Super Luigi U in August
• Mario & Sonic head to Sochi for the Olympics
• New Sonic game is exclusive to Nintendo hardware
• Nintendo of America started localizing Animal Crossing: New Leaf in 2010

Earnings and funding

• April 2013 NPD: Injustice tops software chart as console industry continues to shrink
• Hidden Path finds an angel to finance the final development of Defense Grid 2 (exclusive)
• Ubisoft sales up; plans 5 major games this year including something new
• ‘Video Games: The Movie’ is a feature-length documentary looking for $60K on Kickstarter
• With $1B on the line, Take-Two planning ‘innovative’ marketing for Grand Theft Auto V
• BioShock Infinite sells 3.7 million copies since March launch
• BioShock Infinite and more push Take-Two revenues up 48 percent in fiscal 2013
• Eternal Darkness successor crowdfunding campaign now on Kickstarter
• Cloud-gaming company Ubitus raises $15M to expand its streaming technology
• Japan’s Square Enix loses $134M for fiscal year

New content

• Call of Duty’s Uprising maps storm PlayStation 3 and PC
• Electronic Arts adding amusement parks to SimCity in $10 expansion

Tech

• Razer launching Atrox fighting-game arcade stick this month
• Plantronics blesses e-sports, becomes official sponsor of League of Legends tournament
• Nvidia prices Shield handheld gaming device at $349

Mobile news

• Frostbite Go: EA wants console-grade graphics on your mobile devices
• Tapjoy teams with Kakao Games to provide in-game advertising
• Spair launches testing for its mobile cloud-gaming service

Interviews

• The many paths of survival in The Last of Us (video interview)
• Warframe is the online co-op space ninja game you’ve been waiting for (interview)
• Why The Bureau: XCOM Declassified will be worth the wait (interview)
• Game Horizon’s Will Wright Q&A on the future of games (part two)
• Game Horizon’s Q&A with Will Wright on the future of games

Previews

• Sony reveals more tense moments in The Last of Us (preview)
• The dark, silly, and bizarre influences behind PS3′s Puppeteer (exclusive)
• Scribblenauts Unmasked contains the entire DC Universe (preview)
• The Bureau: XCOM Declassified tactical shooter game will play a lot like Mass Effect (hands-on preview)

Reviews

• Metro: Last Light refuses to let you go (review)

Strange happenings

• Ubisoft suspends development on 1666 game it acquired from THQ
• Gran Turismo 6 officially headed to PlayStation 3 (not PS4) this year

Pieces of flair

• Similarities between Injustice: Gods Among Us and the Justice League cartoon
• Mad Genius builds prototype similiar to Sony’s break-apart DualShock 3 controller idea (video)
• How Imagineers build engaging stories into Disney theme parks
• Warren Spector wants game designers to work on non-combat A.I.

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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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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.”

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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:

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

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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

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

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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

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

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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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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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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

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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.

This column originally appeared on LinkedIn. 

Google Glass is one of the most polarizing user-interface inventions to come along in decades.

We’ll have a chance to see just how polarizing this week when thousands of developers crowd into the Moscone Center in San Francisco for Google I/O, the tech giant’s sixth annual developer conference. Since Glass just started shipping to its earliest adopters, Google I/O will probably have the highest concentration of Google Glass wearers anywhere to date. That means we’ll have plenty of opportunity to watch people struggle with its interface — and to watch bystanders’ reactions. Expect lots of photos of Glass-wearing nerds to pop up in your usual media streams.

On the one hand, Google Glass users look like the Borg, creeping us out as they stare into a digital middle distance that no one else can see. It also raises troubling privacy implications, since it can be used to take photos and video almost surreptitiously.

On the other hand, the device is undoubtedly a harbinger of technologies to come that are even more integrated into our bodies.

The question now is: How do we make the most of this invention without making ourselves look like complete dorks?

Some take a hard-line approach. Bars and restaurants have banned the device. Casinos have said Google Glass is not welcome (due to its potential to help gamblers count cards, no doubt). Other establishments will follow.

Ryan Singel has suggested that lasers could seek out and blind Google Glass cameras using the same technologies currently being investigated for mosquito eradication. (Seriously!)

And many of us will content ourselves with simply making fun of people wearing Google Glass, just as we mock people for wearing Bluetooth headsets.

But let’s not let the dork factor blind us to the real-world possibilities. Google Glass, or something very like it, will have a revolutionary effect in many areas of life.

Among the most promising uses are those that fit into work environments where the addition of data can provide real, meaningful benefits.

Google Glass makes a lot of sense in health care, for instance. Doctors and nurses could use Google Glass to look up prescription details, access patient health records, see reminders about their next appointments, and even get better at recognizing patients’ faces.

What’s more, Glass would have a real benefit in the sanitary environment of a hospital because it could enable health care providers to do all this without having to touch a keyboard or a screen with their hands (or even, god forbid, paper).

For paraplegics and quadriplegics, Glass could be a stunningly useful way to get information and interact with it, as investor John Doerr noted last month when unveiling Kleiner Perkins’ Google Glass-focused investment fund. Its combination of a heads-up display and voice-control mean that it’s potentially ideal for people unable to use hands to control their computing devices. While it might seem creepy to take a picture just by winking, that is exactly the control gesture needed by people who don’t have hands.

For journalists, Google Glass could be an amazing note-taking and content-generating device that lets them shoot videos and photos as they cover a scene in real time. I’m a fan of the Livescribe pen, which lets me capture audio at the same time I’m jotting notes. Whenever I use it to interview someone, I always ask permission to record the audio. The same technique could work with Glass, and I’m looking forward to trying it. Right now, Glass only records 10-second video snippets and only has about 12GB of usable storage, but it shouldn’t be too hard to make an app that records longer audio or compressed video clips, as Jason Perlow noted on ZDNet.

For game designers, Glass presents tempting opportunities to overlay the real world with imaginary video game elements, as Google itself is already doing via Niantic Labs, its experimental augmented-reality project.

Even for tourists, Glass might have some intriguing possibilities: Imagine walking through a neighborhood in Paris, using an app like Findery to view geotagged notes about historical events that happened in a place, interesting architectural details you might have missed, or recommendations for good places to get a pastry and a café au lait.

Just keep in mind that these are special-purpose uses. And just because Glass is useful doesn’t mean I have to enjoy talking with you while you’re wearing it.

Eventually, our attitudes toward Glass and other always-on devices may shift. It’s not uncommon now to see a table full of people at a restaurant, all of whom are busy tapping away at their phones at the same time as they talk to each other. While many people might find that rude, it’s clearly acceptable to a growing circle, whereas five years ago it would have been unheard of.

Similarly, Google Glass might become more socially acceptable as it becomes more ubiquitous.

But that day isn’t here yet. So wear Google Glass all you want at work, or while you’re playing the goggle-eyed tourist or the obnoxious journalist. But please remove the damned thing when you’re talking to me.

Photo: Jolie O’Dell, VentureBeat

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

Cold hard cash — now, that’s love!

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

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

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

   Source: John Koetsier

   Ellie Powers

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

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

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

Image credit: Google

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

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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.

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

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July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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.

“Google is very fortunate to have two large open platforms … two fast-growing platforms,” Pichai said, referring to both Android and Chrome, the world’s most popular browser.

Two years ago Android had just 100 million activations, and just a year ago, Android reached 400 million. Today, at 900 million, it is still more than doubling annually.

But there’s still a long ways to go, Pichai said.

“There are seven billion people on earth,” he said.

In other good news for its mobile operating system, Google’s Hugo Barra announced that Google Play has now passed 48 billion app installs. That’s massive — and it comes just as Apple is announcing its drive to 50 billion installs. But the growth on Android is massive and increasing, with a staggering 2.5 billion app installs just in the last month.

In addition, developers are making more money.

“This year we paid more money already to developers on Google Play than all of last year,” Barra said. “And revenue per user is 2.5x what it was a year ago.”

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

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

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

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

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

Android image via .RGB./Flickr

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

News announced so far:

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

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

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Google is kicking of its Google I/O developer conference today to much anticipation. The company’s shares hit $900 and continued to to climb this morning, a first for Google.

The stock price hit a high of $911.45 around 10:06 a.m. Eastern time this morning and is trading around $906 at the time of this post. That’s up over 2 percent from its opening price of $894. Google has yet to break $900 a share until today, though it has continued to rise steadily in price over the past month.

Google is holding its famed developer conference this week with a three-hour long keynote starting at noon Eastern time. While we’ve heard rumors for weeks about what Google might talk about, investors are seemingly anticipating good things. There hasn’t been much speculation about a big hardware product, release, however.

Investors may be reacting to a new music streaming service that some rumors say may show up at the show, if not the overall fanfare. Reports indicate that Google recently signed two major music partnerships — one with Sony Music Group and another with Universal Music Group — that may give Google the boost it needs to launch a product similar to Spotify. With Spotify, customers can listen to the songs and bands of their choosing on a subscription basis, as opposed to an online radio company like Pandora, where customers can only choose a theme or genre of music to listen to.

Google has also been releasing its Google Glass headwear into the market in the weeks leading up to Google I/O, causing speculation that we’ll hear more about the product in Google’s keynote.

GOOG data by YCharts

Google I/O image via Dylan Tweney/VentureBeat

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

Check out our Google I/O keynote liveblog here.

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

News announced so far:

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

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

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