From Google’s blog post about it:

“You can now speak your searches into the omnibox. Touch the microphone, say your search query aloud and see your results (in some cases spoken back to you), all without typing a single letter.”

Unlike Siri, this is not integrated into the operating system, and can only be accessed through the Chrome app.

Little by little, Google has been fine-tuning and improving its products that run on Apple’s operating system, and it’s having the effect of creating a Google layer on top of iOS.

Not only are all of Google’s major properties accessible in app form on iOS — from YouTube to Google Maps to Mail, Drive, Chrome, Search, Google+ and more — they often best what Apple has to offer. In addition, Google is finding ways to interconnect its apps, so iOS customers can jump from Google service to Google service fluidly. Earlier this month Google introduced a new setting for iOS developers that can enable app users to choose to set links in the Gmail iOS app to open in YouTube, Chrome or Google Maps, as appropriate, by default.

In April the company updated its Google Search app for iOS with Google Now, an assistant app that offers suggestions automatically based on behaviors and preferences expressed across Google’s apps and properties, all of which are on iOS.

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Speaking at a Verizon press conference at CTIA Wireless, Lopez said that there are 52 million Latinos in the U.S. with a combined purchasing power of $1.2 trillion annually, presenting a huge opportunity for a premium mobile service. “As modern Latinos, we do things differently, including how we shop for mobile devices,” said Lopez, who is assuming the role of Viva’s chief creative officer.

The venture might sound like one of the new breed of mobile virtual network operators, like TracFone’s Telcel America, which also targets the Latino community. But it’s not an MVNO. Nor is it a Verizon brand, like Virgin Mobile is brand of Sprint.

The best way to think of Viva Movil is as an authorized dealer, like RadioShack or Best Buy. Verizon has no ownership stake in the Viva, but it will be the venture’s exclusive service and device provider, said Verizon COO and EVP Marni Walden.

The only thing Viva stores will sell other than Verizon phones and services will be a line of accessories such as smartphone cases supposedly designed by Lopez. Viva is also adding a twist on the online front. It will turn its Facebook page into a full retail portal. Customers can see what phones their Facebook friends have bought or recommended, and they will be able to buy their devices and set up their accounts directly from the Facebook page, Lopez said.

The first store will open on June 15 in New York City. Lopez and Walden wouldn’t say where it would be located, though they strongly hinted it would be Times Square. The company plans to follow up with 15 more store openings in cities with big Latino populations.

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In fact, I’d go so far as to say, within a year, many of you will be using a Chromebook. Before you roll your eyes, let me add one caveat: That Chromebook won’t be Google designed hardware; instead it will be on the Mac, Windows or Linux machine you have at that time. So it won’t be a Google build device like my Chromebook Pixel is.

Let’s step back and I’ll explain.

Chrome is widely installed and growing

When Google launched the Chrome browser in late 2008 for Windows, the idea behind it was to speed up your web experience. It took until May of 2010 for all three major operating systems to have a stable version of the browser. Since then, usage has grown tremendously. Looking at market share summaries from five sources (consolidated at Wikipedia), four of them show Chrome as the biggest market share in March, 2013. (Note: April’s numbers are missing one source, which is why I’ve pointed to March figures.)

If you follow browser share statistics — hey, we all need a hobby — this won’t surprise you. Chrome has continued to slowly grow its worldwide user base with rather steady progress. And there’s little reason to assume that trend will change any time soon. So what does that mean?

For many Chrome is just a browser. For others who use a Chromebox or Chromebook, like myself, it’s my full-time operating system. The general consensus is that Chrome OS, the platform used on these devices, can only browse the web and run either extensions and web apps; something any browser can do. Simply put, the general consensus is wrong and the signs are everywhere.

Let’s talk about Chrome apps

First, much time was spent at Google I/O on two key topics we featured on last week’s GigaOM Chrome Show podcast: Packaged Apps and Native Client apps. You can listen to the show for a full description by Google’s own Joe Marini, but I’ll summarize the concept here.

Packaged apps are written in HTML, JavaScript and CSS, just like a traditional website or web app. There’s one subtle difference though. These apps are “packaged” in a way that allows them to run outside of the Chrome browser on any device that has Chrome installed. And they can run when the user is offline. Google Keep is a perfect example of this. I use it as a to-do list outside of my browser, both online and offline. When I don’t have a connection, my data is saved locally and when I later connect to the web, Google Keep automatically syncs my data to the cloud.

Here’s an image from my Chromebook showing Google Keep outside of the browser. Note too, the notification message at the bottom right; Google has added these in the developer channel of Chrome, bringing even more desktop features to the environment.

Native client apps are similar in that they’re also packaged and they support offline access. There’s a key difference however: These apps are coded in their native programming languages — C or C++ for example — compiled and then embedded in HTML where they behave like standalone native apps. Google says there’s about a 5 percent overhead performance hit, so they’re not quite as fast as their native app counterparts.

A good example of a native client app is a game I played on my Chromebook Pixel recently called Cracking Sands Racing The app, a port of a game for iOS and Android, was a 533 MB download to my Pixel and I played it outside of the browser. Even better, the support for a gamepad worked just fine as I used an Xbox 360 controller to play the game. Controls and graphics were responsive; no different overall that if I was playing a version of the game on a Mac or PC.

I know what you’re thinking. “That’s good for you since you have a Chromebook. What do I care?”

Chrome is a back door to the new app economy

Here’s the thing: Both Packaged Apps and Native Client apps work on any computer that has the Chrome browser installed. You remember: the browser that has the biggest market share. Even better, Google is working on Portable Native Client, which extends the native client app support to mobiles. Meanwhile, at Google I/O, the company said these apps can work on mobiles through Apache Cordova, a set of cross-platform APIs that support iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone and more.

You can see where I’m going with this but lets take it a step further. Have you noticed that Google recently added the Chrome App Launcher to Microsoft Windows? It’s the same app launcher that’s native to Chrome OS. And Google is working on it for the Mac platform; it’s already in the developer channel for Chromium. And it’s sure to follow for Linux.

Essentially, once you can run web, Packaged and Native Client apps on any device with the Chrome framework, you need an easy way to manage and launch them. Think of Chrome as a platform environment atop a platform. On my Pixel, Chrome runs over Linux. For you, Chrome may run on top of Windows or OS X. Both of those have their own program launchers but as developers expand the number of Chrome apps, you’ll use the Chrome App Launcher to access them.

By the way, in the launcher picture above, did you notice that CIRC doesn’t have the same little arrow as the other icons? That means it’s an app, not a web shortcut.

Wait, won’t the big platform players block this?

Along with the disruption of mobile devices, the physical media market has undergone changes too. We typically don’t buy apps on a disk to install them any longer. Instead, platforms are providing centralized applications stores that they maintain control over. The Mac App Store is a perfect example. Note that you can install apps from outside of the App Store, provided you allow for such actions in your security settings. Since these stores are controlled by the platform makers, won’t Apple, Microsoft and others try to keep Chrome apps from spreading to the desktop?

They can try but I don’t think they’ll succeed, expect maybe on mobiles. If people find the apps compelling enough, they’ll be in an uproar for starters. But there’s another possible reason and I think it’s brilliant on Google’s part.

I noticed that when I downloaded Cracking Sands Racing, the video game I was able to play offline on my Pixel, the file had a .crx file extension. That may not look familiar to you, but I recognize it. It’s the same file extension Chrome uses for browser extensions. If that naming convention holds true, any company blocking Chrome app installations would also block Chrome extensions. How would the Chrome using community react to that? Not well.

What does your desktop look like a year from now?

As I alluded to at the beginning of this post, if you’re a Chrome user today, you’ll be more immersed in the Chrome ecosystem a year from now, even if you don’t have an “official” Chromebook. This all depends on how well Google pulls off its strategy to upend the desktop computing world, but so far, it seems to be on track.

Bear in mind the apps in this vision will be truly cross-platform as they’ll run on any Windows, Mac or Linux computer with Chrome installed. If it can get developers on board — and those I spoke with at Google I/O are ready to embrace the effort — Google will have a thriving desktop platform built on top of the platforms created by others. But it will be a desktop that’s far more agile, with new features added within days or weeks, not months or years.

Welcome to Chrome, my desktop today and your desktop of the future.

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McGinnis said that it will soon offer a similar wallet to customers of its other prepaid brand — Virgin Mobile — and it is considering bringing it to the main Sprint brand as well. Sprint also plans to build on Wallet’s initial batch of services, to create what McGinnis calls “a virtual bank” for its customers.

Today, Boost’s Mobile Wallet can transfer funds between accounts, pay e-bills, wire money to physical locations and, with the help of prepaid Visa card, you can make purchases and withdraw money from ATMs anywhere Visa is accepted. Soon Boost’s wallet will let you scan physical checks, depositing funds directly into your wallet account.

But McGinnis said there are other services in the works. He didn’t provide specific deals, but it’s not hard to imagine features like virtual checking accounts or peer-to-peer payments such as those offered by PayPal, Venmo and now Google and Square.

Sprint doesn’t want to become bank itself — that would put it under the regulatory scrutiny of the U.S. Department of Treasury, which Sprint wants to avoid, McGinnis said. Instead, Sprint is working with Wipit, a mobile payments provider focusing on people without bank accounts and credit cards, to provide the financial services infrastructure.

“From the customer’s point of view, it’s kind of a bank in the sky that is Boost backed,” McGinnis said.

Sprint’s wallet is unique because it focuses on what the financial industry calls the unbanked – households that deal almost entirely in cash. Most other wallet and financial services apps are linked to bank accounts, credit and debit cards. This approach to financial services has had a huge impact in other parts of the world and has made Kenyan mobile operator Safaricom the biggest bank in East Africa.

The U.S. isn’t Kenya, of course, but according to a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation study (pdf), 8.2 percent of U.S. households have no bank account whatsoever, while an additional 20.1 percent of U.S. households have a bank account but also make use of alternative financial services such as check cashing and payday loan companies.

Of the major providers, Sprint is in an ideal position to serve those customers. People who rely primarily on cash naturally gravitate towards prepaid mobile phones, and Sprint is one of the most aggressive carriers when it comes to prepaid. It runs three prepaid brands (Boost, Virgin and Assurance Wireless) and offers pay-as-you-go options on its primary Sprint brand as well. At the end of the first quarter it had 16 million customers on prepaid plans.

While Mobile Wallet’s initial focus will be on those unbanked customers, McGinnis said there is a lot of potential for the app for customers who have traditional bank accounts, especially as Sprint and Wipit add new features to the app. That’s one of the reasons McGinnis thinks Mobile Wallet will be a good fit for Sprint’s contract customers.

Sprint already is working with Google on mobile payments, but McGinnis pointed out that Google Wallet is really a point-of-sale transaction technology linking to credit cards or bank accounts. Meanwhile, Sprint’s Wallet is intended to be a replacement for or a supplement to those accounts and payments cards — just without the actual bank.

“There’s nothing broken with plastic in retail today,” McGinnis said. Sprint, he added, just wants to make that plastic available to more people.

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Zite outlined the changes in a blog post. CEO Mark Johnson has been pretty vocal about how he doesn’t think Zite should be like Google Reader, and told me the new features Zite has added to its iOS app are those that “enhance the user experience both for Google Reader users and the reading population in general.” Articles will now “gray out” after they’ve been read, users will be able to save sources as favorites and Zite’s algorithm will pay more attention to obscure content:

“One of the biggest problems with Google Reader is that RSS feeds which publish many stories per day tend to dominate your feed, so the obscure blog you found a few years ago that publishes every three months can be drowned out in the noise. Zite’s algorithm will more aggressively highlight rare content, so feel free to ‘like’ publishers that you enjoy, no matter how popular or rare.”

An Android update is coming soon.

Zite’s also added seven new publishers to its publisher program, bringing the total number of publishers it works with to 24. The new publishers are GigaOM, Atlantic Media (with The Atlantic and Quartz), Business Insider, Fast Company, Salon, Say Media (Remodelista and ReadWrite) and Serious Eats, and they join existing publishers like CNN (Zite’s parent company), the Huffington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. Zite publisher partners share their “best-of” content in their own sections of Zite’s app, and can run their own ads against their content.

“We are also starting to look at ways to monetize publisher content,” Johnson said. That’s something Zite’s competitors are already doing: The New York Times makes content available to paying subscribers through Flipboard, and the Wall Street Journal has a similar arrangement with Pulse.

Here’s a video of Johnson speaking about the future of content personalization at paidContent 2013:

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At the SID Display Week event currently in progress, Qualcomm is showing off its latest smartphone screen tech that tops and eye-popping 577 pixels per inch.

Engadget is on site at the show and captured some video of the 5.1-inch display and its 2560 x 1440 resolution:

The screen uses Qualcomm’s Mirasol technology, which we’ve been covering for the past four years. Sadly, no major product hits have used a Mirasol panel in all that time and Qualcomm says that the smartphone screen is just a prototype; it could be another few years before such a pixel-packing screen is ready for mass production.

Higher resolution isn’t the only benefit here, however. Mirasol uses reflective light and microscopic MEMS (Microelectromechanical systems) to create small airgaps in the display; as the airgap size changes, the light color passing through it is manipulated. As a result, the screens are very power efficient, up to six times more than today’s LCD and OLED screens.

Aside from the time to market then, is there a downside? Because the displays primarily use reflective light — although they can be front-lit — colors often appear washed out as compared to traditional screens. I’m not sure if there’s a solution for that challenge, but my money is on Qualcomm to find one if it exists.

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Kodera isn’t the only recent departure, however, which makes the situation a little more bleak. Here are a few more joining the exodus, per The Verge:

“It’s not just Kodera. In the past three-odd months, HTC has lost a number of employees in rapid succession — most recently Jason Gordon, the company’s vice president of global communications. Other fresh departures include global retail marketing manager Rebecca Rowland, director of digital marketing John Starkweather, and product strategy manager Eric Lin.”

I knew that Lin had left: He moved recently to become a Product Marketing Manager for Skype after five years with HTC. The others are news to me, but in hindsight, perhaps not surprising given the company’s rough ride of late: delays for the HTC One flagship phone due to supply issues and the lack of buzz around the HTC First, a phone that highlights the Facebook experience.

With HTC’s fall from prominence in the U.S., it’s possible — likely even — that the Tawian-based company consolidates operations back to its home country. With Apple and Samsung dominating U.S. phone sales, it may make sense for HTC to concentrate more effort on the bigger opportunities in Asia. To do so really doesn’t require much of a U.S. presence, sadly.

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You can see some of that future in Chromium for the Mac, which is getting the Chrome App launcher. Our extension of the week dovetails with Google’s new Play Music All Access subscription service. And while Kevin still loves the Chromebook Pixel, he pleads with Google to add one important function to Chromebooks: Support for Google Play movie and TV downloads.

Show notes

Hosts: Chris Albrecht and Kevin C. Tofel

• So what was Google I/O like, what’s new for Chrome and what new services did Google add?
• More Intel-powered hardware builds are being tested
• Chromium for Mac getting the App launcher
• What’s Google’s vision for Chrome? To take over the world, of course!
• Extension of week: Better Music for Google Play Music
• When will Google add movie and TV downloads for Chromebooks?

Got questions, tips or tricks for an upcoming GigaOM Chrome Show? Find Kevin on Google+, Twitter (@kevinctofel) or via e-mail (kevin@gigaom.com)

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Anyway, Truecaller now has 600 million partly crowdsourced names and phone numbers in its database, which is quite a lot, and it’s decided to open up this information to third parties that can make good use of it. “Great,” you might think, “what a boon to telemarketers.” But no, Truecaller is rather sensibly hand-picking those developers who get to tap into its newly-launched, 3scale-managed API, and telemarketers are not welcome at all.

As for potential uses for this reverse lookup service, that’s up to the developer’s imagination. Here’s what Truecaller CEO Alan Mamedi suggests:

“Among many other scenarios, the Truecaller API could be used to save time in call centres. Each call centre minute is connected to a cost. By using our API, both local and global, call centres can identify who is calling even before starting the call. Win-win.”

Truecaller’s database is populated by two main sources: traditional phone directory services and users who are willing to upload their address books. This latter source means it can contain numbers that are unlisted, including pay-as-you-go phone numbers. Numbers in the database come with two types of scores: a “spam score” to rate how likely it is that they are associated with telesales or robocalls, and a “true score” to denote importance.

Importantly, name search will not be a function associated with the API – it will only be available on the mobile app, meaning the API can only be used for reverse lookup purposes.

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As part of reaching that objective, Cloudbase.io has launched a shared API to encourage data-sharing between apps. By way of example, someone coming up with a Foursquare-like idea could decide to use Cloudbase.io to build their application. Cloudbase.io would handle the backend for that app, and the developer could tell the BaaS provider to let other apps access their shared API, allowing those apps to draw on the app’s check-in data and creating opportunities for business deals down the line.

As Buliani told me:

“What I found everywhere [as I was promoting] Cloudbase.io was that everybody with a background as a backend developer instantly got it. Mobile developers were questioning the need for their application to be connected to the internet. Most mobile developers are only mobile developers; they’ve never done anything else before – never worked on websites, for example. They had this mentality of building the small game for mobile.

“The premise for the idea is that we want mobile applications to become platforms. We want them to be able to publish their own layer of APIs, even though it’s hosted on Cloudbase.io. Cloudbase.io becomes invisible in the background. We want to encourage them to be as ambitious as possible and think of themselves as a platform. It’s a chicken-and-egg game of course – what came first, the business or the API? – but we want them to be prepared for it.”

This perspective is unsurprising coming from Buliani, a developer (he was part of the early Covestor team) who became a management consultant in London’s financial heart before returning to tech. But then again, Cloudbase.io is not the only company trying to help smalltime developers think bigger.

So what about rivals such as Parse? According to Buliani, there’s a “philosophical difference” between the two outfits.

“The easiest example is, if you want to build an application on top of Parse you have to register the users of your application within that framework, so your application will have to have authentication. With Cloudbase.io you can have no authentication — it’s entirely up to you,” he said, adding that he was proud of the fact that all of Cloudbase.io’s libraries are open source and available on Github.

Of course, Cloudbase.io’s new service also crosses over somewhat with the territory of API management specialists such as Apigee and 3scale.

As with Parse, it’s free to register with Cloudbase.io and get going. Once the app’s in an app store, users need to start paying – the most basic account costs $11.99 a month, which comes with a gigabyte of data exchange. Above that are professional ($47.99 for 8GB) and enterprise ($119.99 for 20GB) tiers, with the possibility of negotiated pricing for higher volumes.

Users should take note of how data exchange volume pricing works with the shared API. If the app accessing data from the original, Cloudbase.io-using app is also using the same BaaS platform, it’s that second app that gets charged. If the second app is off-platform, it will obviously be the original app’s developers who get charged (it might be smart to publish the shared API but keep it password protected).

Incidentally, for those developers who need as much help as possible, Cloudbase.io also partnered up last month with MoSync, a provider of open-source tools for building mobile applications. The idea there is for MoSync to allow the building and compiling of the apps, with Cloudbase.io adding in the connectivity, geo-location and social pieces.

(And on another note, cloud infrastructure and data-sharing will definitely be on the agenda for discussion at our Structure:Europe conference, which will run in London on September 18-19.)

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