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Co-Hosts: Tom Krazit
Guests: Kevin Tofel, Janko Roettgers, Eliza Kern

Google may not have announced Android 4.3, but it made Android better while unifying it with Chrome.

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One of the underwater Streetview cameras, on display at Google I/O.

Google launched Streetview for the world’s oceans in cooperation with Underwater Earth the at the end of last year, and has mapped a total of six sites so far, including the Great Barrier Reef in Australia as well as reefs in Hawaii and the Philippines. Vevers explained that his organization’s Catlin Seaview Survey has been using divers carrying custom-made cameras that shoot photos every three seconds, with divers being able to cover about two kilometers during every expedition.

That’s slow — maybe too slow. The world’s coral reefs are receding quickly, which has been one of the main motivations behind the project. “We set up our project to reveal the reefs of the world,” Vevers said, adding: “People don’t want to protect anything they can’t see.”

However, Verers said showing off the beauty of coral reefs to the world is only “half the story.” The project has also been working on image recognition technologies, with the goal of mapping species and giving scientists around the world access to new material to work with.

So why did Google get involved with the project? Foulkes said that it wasn’t driven by commercial motivations, but freely admitted that it was also about showing off the capabilities of Google Maps. One example: Vevers’ team uses Google’s business photos tool, which is meant to give stores the ability to upload panoramic photos, to create its underwater photospheres.

Vevers’ plan is to capture and reveal all of the world’s coral reefs within the next three years. “We feel this is very much a race against time,” he said. That’s why the project now wants to enlist amateurs in its quest as well. Divers can simply use their cell phones in water-proof cases and then upload their photospheres to Google Maps. And he urged volunteers to become active soon: “What happens in the next ten years is likely going to affect our oceans fo the next 10,000 years.”

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But this morning when I was walking through downtown San Francisco before Google’s I/O conference, I was crossing a street when I saw a particularly pretty scene of the sun rising between two buildings. Hoping I’d have enough time before the walk signal ended, I dug my iPhone out of my bag, swiped to open the camera, snapped a photo, and then jogged to the curb to avoid getting hit by cars. (Mom, I hope you’re not reading this.)

So a few hours later, when I tried on Google Glass for the first time and said the command “take photo,” instantly capturing a photo of my colleague Kevin Tofel standing in front of me without moving either my head or my hands, I started to see the appeal of Glass.

I’d read a decent amount about the technology since Sergey Brin dropped from a helicopter at last year’s Google I/O, and not only was I sort of confused by the specifics of how Glass works (A camera on your face? Facebook on top of everyday life? How do people see when they’re wearing them?), I was turned off by the severely dorky appearance and the idea of constantly monitoring the things around you. They seemed vaguely creepy and intrusive. I was not attracted to the idea of wearing them as a normal person walking around town.

But even though I only got a short spin with the technology on Wednesday, it only took a few seconds for me to understand why people are so jazzed about Glass.

I put them on my face and was immediately impressed with how lightweight they felt. Despite their futuristic, clunkly-on-one-side appearance, they didn’t feel very bulky or heavy on my face, and it was easy to see the room around me while wearing them. (Even though they weren’t fitted specifically for my face the way they would be if I purchased them.) The screen felt much smaller and unobtrusive than I’d imagined, and it wasn’t hard to swipe the side of the glasses to navigate the screen. But it was the voice commands, and the “take photo” command, that changed my perspective on the technology.

Would I spend $1,500 on them right now? Definitely not. If you need prescription glasses of any kind, it would be hard to combine those with Glass. While Google has launched them in some jazzy new colors, you still look absurd wearing them (whether you’re in the shower or not). This probably makes me somewhat vain, but I’d want them to look cooler and less futuristic before I wore them in everyday life (seriously, embed them in some Warby Parker frames, and I’d be way more down with the idea.)

And once apps start streaming into the glasses, I can’t imagine how seeing New York Times headlines and tweets wouldn’t be distracting while you’re doing things like walking or driving. Of course, none of this even gets into the new etiquette that would have to arise from the spread of Glass.

But despite all the drawbacks, speaking the words for the “take photo” command made me realize that even if wearable computing has a pretty dorky image right now, the potential practical applications for real-life people who don’t consider themselves nerds are endless — once the technology gets a little more refined, and we figure out how to use them in public.

I talked to one Google employee who said she sat in her sister’s graduation and streamed video through Glass to family members from afar, and another who said she uses it to take photos of her little kids when her hands are full. I would imagine it could be huge for people with disabilities, or people doing outdoor sports (Kevin mentioned you could take photos of mile markers while running a marathon.)

“Every time we’ve tried to do something crazy we’ve made progress,” Larry Page said on stage today. So does Google Glass seem a little nuts right now? Sure. But if a few years from now I can snap a photo of a sunrise without having a near-miss with traffic, I’m open to the possibilities.

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According to a Monday blog post from Michael Manoochehri, a Google developer program engineer, Google will take the data coming in from the Arduino boards and visualize it all in real time with Google Cloud Platform services such as Google Compute Engine and BigQuery. And it’s no teensy-weensy data set:

“Altogether, the sensors network will provide over 4,000 continuous data streams over a ZigBee mesh network managed by Device Cloud by Etherios.”

The visualizations will be on display on screens during the conference. And Google said it will make the Cloud Platform code and the resulting data available in open source.

O’Reilly Media has used Arduinos at events for similar purposes before, as I reported in February. How are the deployments different? For one thing, Google uses the Google cloud — surprise, surprise — while O’Reilly has used Amazon Web Services. The question is whether the project will persuade non-Google developers to try using the Google Cloud Platform for their own programs to crunch data generated by sensors.

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I have no inside knowledge on this, I have heard no juicy rumors — so I could be completely wrong. But I do think the timing is right for Android @Home.

False starts: connected lightbulbs and the Nexus Q

Remember the Nexus Q?

First, a bit of history. Google initially introduced Android @Home at its Google I/O conference in 2011. Back then, the company painted the picture of all kinds of household appliances being connected to a home gateway, controlled by Android devices. One of the first devices coming to market was supposed to be an Android-connected LED light bulb. The bulb was supposed to be manufactured by Lighting Science and come to market by the end of 2011.

That never happened, and there hasn’t been any official word about the status of the project since. Instead, Google introduced the ill-fated Nexus Q at its 2012 Google I/O conference. The music streamer was meant to compete with Sonos and deliver cloud-hosted whole-home audio – but overwhelmingly negative reception led Google to scrap the project, and give away thousands of units for free.

Third time’s a charm?

However, Android @Home is far from dead. Android enthusiasts recently found traces of Android @Home in the Android 4.2.2 update. And some casual searches on LinkedIn reveal that the company isn’t just maintaining the team, but actively hiring and adding people to the fold. There are industrial designers and software engineers “working on Android@Home cloud services,” managers who’ve been working on “Nexus Q and other fun things to come” and numerous other people listing Android@ Home as their current area of work. A bunch of them have actually been hired in 2013.

What exactly are they working on? It’s hard to tell from the resumes alone, and one guy even admits:

“My job is so secret, sometimes even I do not know what I do.”

However, it’s worth pointing out that quite a few people list Jawbone as a previous employer, hinting at the possibility of additional audio devices. I’ve also heard that Lighting Science is still working on the LED project, so we might actually see Android-connected lightbulbs make a comeback.

Android @home’s killer feature: speech recognition

Android @Home’s bigger vision has always been to connect everything in your home, not just a single lightbulb or a speaker system in your living room. Back in 2011, Android @Home hardware director Joe Britt told me:

“In thinking about accessories as devices that surround the phone, we started thinking about how far away from the phone you could migrate. Is a light bulb a potential accessory? Is a dishwasher a potential accessory?”

Google’s voice recognition already controls Google TV devices. Will it come to your lightbulbs next?

One of the key pieces to tie all of those things together could be Google’s voice recognition. The company’s cloud-based voice recognition features have advanced a lot in the last few years, to the point where voice has become one of the main input methods for Google TV.

The same capabilities could also be used to control your lighting, play your music or even adjust your thermostat. Check out this cool new demo video below, put together by home automation enthusiast Doug Gregory to get a sense of what’s possible when voice and home automation come together:

Gregory didn’t use Android @Home for this demo, but instead relied on a number of different tools. But Google has definitely been looking to utilize voice for Android @Home, as one software engineer professes on LinkedIn:

“Deliver speech recognition and natural language processing technologies (context aware, embedded and online) to the mobile ecosystem. Build client and server side infrastructure for integration across multiple Google products in all languages. Currently working in Google Now, Google Glass, Android@Home and others.”

Android @home’s other killer feature: Google Now and the knowledge graph

Here’s another feature that could set the 2013 version of Android @Home apart from its 2011 roots: Google’s new focus on the knowledge graph, and its pretty face that is Google Now. The Google Now app already pushes all kinds of relevant information to your mobile, including the time it will take you to get home and the weather in the city you’re going to visit tomorrow.

Google Now already keeps track of your packages and your commute – so why not your home appliances?

Now imagine Google would add data it gets from your Android @Home devices to the mix. Swipe up on your Android phone, and you’ll be able to check the settings of your thermostat, get more information about the band that’s been playing on your home stereo system (including tour dates) or check how much money you’re gonna spend on electricity this month. It’s a pretty compelling vision, and one that gets even more interesting once you feed data from your Android @Home devices back to the knowledge graph.

Granted, a pretty UI powered by Google Now cards and voice recognition isn’t all Android @Home needs to succeed – but both would definitely be big steps to make consumers feel more at home in their connected house.

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One was the Red Hat Summit. The other was Google I/O. Guess which was which.

The two shows spotlighted the dichotomy of the tech between stolid-if-productive companies that furnish technologies (or at least support and service of technologies) that businesses pay for. The other represents dot.com-era consumer-oriented ventures with gobs of dough, but not much of it deriving from actual product sales. (Online advertising is a whole other matter.)

Google I/O day one was marked by a bit of chaos — the keynote kicked off with half the attendees still milling around outside . No such snafus for the orderly Red Hat crowd. Google had lots of virtual reality fun and games after hours. Red Hat had cocktails at Fenway Park. Neither is good or bad, just different.

Red Hat brought out Red Hat Storage, as expected. It brings acquired Gluster technology firmly into the fold to form another layer of the Red Hat stack. And it updated its OpenShift PaaS roadmap. Google showed off slick new tablets and Google Glasses and debuted its  infrastructure as a service which, arguably will end up competing with Red Hat but more importantly represents a full-on assault on Amazon’s EC2 public cloud monolith. In fact, Amazon, with its public cloud might, may be one thing these two companies have in common — Amazon’s coming after both of them.

Contending with Amazon’s cloud

Paul Cormier,  Red Hat’s president of worldwide products and technologies addressed the Amazon-as-threat issue in an interview this week but said it will be hard for Amazon to lure enterprise applications into its cloud.

“If I’m a three-person startup and want to get online fast, great, I’ll do AWS. I’d be crazy to buy hardware and software to do that. But as an enterprise spread across multiple sites, I have to worry about security, reliability — all the ‘ilities,’” he said. “The risk with the public cloud stuff is you get locked in the same way you used to get locked into the Suns, the DECs, the HPs of the world.”

Still, I have to note, that other enterprise tech players, including HP, are painfully aware of Amazon. Folks who say Amazon won’t target — and win — some enterprise workloads — should remember that most people never foresaw that an online book seller would become one of the biggest tech powers on the planet.

Amazon won’t ever be an enterprise tech supplier? Never say never.

Feature photo courtesy of Flickr user Red Hat’s official stream

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At Google I/O Google shared some new numbers that it says show Google App Engine, its platform as a service, is gaining momentum.

Most interesting to me is that the company now claims 250,000 active users. That’s up from the 150,000 active users it claimed thus far. The company is fighting the perception that GAE is not a top priority.

Here are more new Google-supplied metrics:

Google App Engine

• gets 7.5 billion daily hits
• fields 1 million active applications
• half of all Internet IP addresses touch GAE servers each week
• 50 million Cloud SQL queries per day
• trillion data store operations per month

Check back here for continuing live Google I/O coverage.

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June, it seems, is the season for new product announcements in Silicon Valley. At its annual WWDC shindig,  Apple announced a slew of new products including its hot-new Macbook Pro with Retina display and iOS 6. A few days later, Microsoft announced Surface, a new tablet/computer that has been designed by Microsoft team and will be sold under the Microsoft brand in Microsoft stores.

And this week it seems it is Google’s turn. So far, it has announced massive upgrades to its search platform, the newest version of Android (Jellybean), the Google Glass, the Nexus 7 tablet and a new multimedia device, Nexus Q. It is also likely to introduce a new cloud offering at its Google I/O event, as I reported earlier.

However, when you stand back from all the announcements made by Google today and increase the periphery, you start to notice that this is a company that is fighting a lot of battles on many fronts. In some places it is winning, but most places it is trench warfare.

It is still the king of search and advertising. It is doing quite well when it comes to Android, though they never really talk about its real financial impact on Google’s business. I would argue that Google Apps and Google Chrome OS have a decent shot of carving out a meaningful role inside corporations, retailers, airlines and campuses. Google Maps is a market leader and well, there is nothing like YouTube – though the monetary impact of the video colossus is still kept under a fog by Google. However, this is where the list of sure things end. Simply take a look at this list of what I believe are important battles Google is fighting, and you begin to understand the challenges that Google faces.

Apple

• Google’s Android is fighting with Apple’s iOS platform. It says a million new devices are being activated every day and there are 400 million Android devices out there.
• Google just launched Nexus 7 to essentially compete with Apple’s iPad and other tablets in the market.
• Google TV and Apple TV are in competition for the dollars and attention of connected-entertainment consumers.
• Google Drive vs iCloud.
• Google Maps versus Apple Maps.
• Google Wallet/Play versus the Apple iTunes platform.
• Google Books, Google Music and other Media versus iTunes and iBooks.

Microsoft

• Google’s Chrome OS is taking on Microsoft’s OS.
• Google Apps versus Microsoft Office Apps.
• Google Android versus Microsoft Windows 8 platform.
• Google Nexus 7 tablet versus Microsoft Surface tablet.
• Google Cloud will be competing for Microsoft’s Azure cloud and developer affections.
• Google Drive versus Microsoft Skydrive.
• Google Search versus Microsoft Bing.

Amazon

• Google Nexus 7 versus Amazon’s Kindle Fire.
• Google Android platform versus the Amazon Fork.
• Google Cloud wants to challenge Amazon Web Services.
• Google Wallet versus Amazon payment system.
• Google Books, Google Music and other media plays versus Amazon Music, Books and Media

Facebook

• Google+ versus Facebook.
• Google messaging versus Facebook Messaging.
• Google Picasa versus Facebook Photos.
• Google Ad Platform versus Facebook Ad Platform.
• Google Search versus Facebook Social Discovery.

And there are some other companies Google is tussling with.

• Google Drive versus DropBox as a hub of mobile data and apps.
• Google Nexus Q versus Sonos.
• Google Local versus Yelp.
• Google Wallet versus Paypal, Square.
• Google Search versus Twitter.
• Google+ versus Twitter.
• Google’s YouTube versus others such as Hulu.

The human cost of these battles

When I see Google fighting those battles, I can’t help but recall those history lessons. Rome, Napoleon and his Napoleonic wars, the Ottoman empire – they all took on challenges on multiple fronts and eventually lost. The human costs proved to be too much. Google too faces a similar dilemma. Admittedly, it has all the money in the world, but despite tens of thousands of employees, it lacks the star power to win on all fronts. Google no longer has a monopoly on attracting great talent to its team.

Bret Taylor, outgoing CTO of Facebook & ex-Googler

Google today has to keep buying companies to attract talent, but frankly that may not be enough. There are rivals who offer more attractive options to the Bret Taylors (ex-Google Maps & then CTO, Facebook) of the world. Why work at Google Wallet when you can get a gig at Square? Why stay at Google when Facebook beckons? Why be a product manager when you can start Instagram and cash out for a cool billion?

Having followed Google from its very inception, I know that Google’s product and experience was far superior to its competitors, many of who were essentially weakly run companies that were hobbled by the dot-com bust. Yahoo, despite its size, wasn’t really a great competitor for Google’s search technology and was too plodding in its embrace of search-based advertising.

Microsoft, too, was focused on its software businesses to actually put up a good fight in the marketplace. The second decade of the 21st century is proving to be a much tougher place for Google. The new rivals — everyone from Apple and Facebook to upstarts like Dropbox and Square — are more more fierce, more focused and more hungry.  The attitude of me-too-ism isn’t enough for Google.

As Google tries to expand into new territories it is leaving its core search vulnerable — not to another rival’s technology, but to end-users. The injection of Google+ into search results seems to be a growing point of dissatisfaction.

In my years of following the company, I came to understand that what separated Google from many of its competitors was its audacity. When search was supposed to be a dead-end, they did one better. When advertising was mired in morass, they took an existing idea of text ads and turned it into mega-billion dollar empire. The scale of Google’s infrastructure and belief that software was indeed going to be the intelligence inside a company were concepts that were inherently futuristic and ambitious. Google Mail and Google Maps are two other projects that started small but proved to have that special Google quality.

When I look at the first day of Google I/O, I am left impressed by Google Glass. The product itself is too nerdy and it still has ways to go before it becomes an everyday product. Nevertheless, it represents a bit of old Google. It represents the kind of things the company needs to do in order to leap forward of its rivals.

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• 400 million active Android devices worldwide. Around this time last year, there were 100 million active Android devices.
• Google is activating 1 million Android devices daily.
• A million NFC-enabled devices are being activated every week.
• South Korea and Japan saw 200 percent year over year growth in activations of Android devices.
• India, Thailand and Brazil saw 400 percent increase in activations on a year-over-year basis.
• There are 600,000 Android apps.
• There have been 20 billion app installs to date.
• Two-third of Play revenue comes from outside of the US.
• Google has more than 4 million books in the Play store.
• YouTube has 800 million monthly users.
• There are 350 million mobile devices with YouTube installed on them.
• Twitter users share 700 YouTube videos every minute.

And now for the Google+ numbers.

• 250 million accounts.
• 150 million monthly active Google+ users.
• 75 million daily active users.
• Apparently daily actives spend more than 12 minutes per day.

Here’s our recap of Day One as it unfolded.

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For many, Google App Engine has seemed a sideline for the big search company, a perception some Google execs have labored to correct. Google claimed 150,000 active GAE developers going into the show, a number it will doubtless update.

Having talked with a couple of the GAE faithful, here’s a developer wish list for GAE.

1. Better search. Here’s irony for you: it’s not easy to put full text search into GAE applications and one European developer — who requested anonymity — said he hopes to get this long-overdue capability, which Google acknowledges is one of GAE’s most requested features, soon. Another GAE user agreed:  ”We would definitely love Google to release full text search not [just] for documents but also integrated into the data store ,” said Alberto Gualis, a software developer for Frogtek. Google showed off that capability in a video last year.
2. Cross application namespace. It would be great to have a secure and simple way to connect multiple independent applications on the same data store, said Gil Zimmermann, CEO of CloudLock, a company that runs and works with GAE.
3.  SSL support for custom domains. GAE right now does not allow this, said Greg Bayer, backend engineering lead for Pulse, the popular news reader for mobile devices. “We use Pulse.me as our custom domain but if you want HTTPS for sending passwords etc. you have to use their domain. It works but it’s not a great, seamless user experience,” he said.
4. Faster bulk import and export of  data. Getting big amounts of data into and out of GAE data stores can be time intensive especially compared to Amazon, developers said. “Bulk import and export are there in GAE but they are slow. If you want to download a few gigs of data it can take forever,” Bayer said.
5. Tuneable memcache eviction policies. Right now, if your app is running out of capacity, GAE will dump the oldest data — which is what memcache does. It would be better, however, if the app owner could prioritize the data to be dumped first. Some of that older data may be good to have around as opposed some newer, but less critical data.
6. Enterprise-class sandbox. Cloudlock’s Zimmermann, perhaps because he deals with business customers, would love to see a subscription option to test out applications with very large data sets. It could be a premium offering with perhaps lower price structures for the biggest data sets or some sort of size cap.
7. Faster data store snapshotting. Again, this function is in GAE, but it’s slow particularly for large data sets.
8. Log analytics tools. Business developers would like to see better log retention and analytics tools and perhaps even native integration into Splunk or similar third-party tools.
9. Cloud SQL general availability. Several developers said they await the general release (is there such a thing anymore) of Google Cloud SQL.

No conference wish list is complete without a discussion of the show swag factor. As in, what freebies will attendees get? The aforementioned nameless European developer wants to know if it’ll be a new Android phone, tablet, or Chromebook perhaps? A Google TV? Google Goggles? Inquiring minds want to know.

Meanwhile, check out Kevin Tofel’s look at what to expect from Android at Google I/O and Janko Roettgers’ thoughts on what could be in store for Google TV.

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