Although YouTube worldwide increasingly colocated staff in Google offices we maintained worldwide headquarters as a standalone building in San Bruno. Coming to an office every day that said YouTube in big letters and was filled w just other folks working on the same goal - incredibly motivating. We would have gotten lost on Google’s main campus. We needed separate space and identity. Not because we were better but because we were different. How could we have a community that believed in us if we didn’t feel like a tribe ourselves. We had a building, we had a heartbeat.
Elapsed Time: Don’t Mess Up Tumblr: Five Lessons Learned from YouTube
Google’s mobile platform now accounts for nearly 75% of all handset sales, a jump of almost 20 percentage points on a year ago, and equating to 156 million devices sold in the three-month period. Smartphones sales grew by 63 million units to 210 million for the quarter, making up nearly half of all mobile phone sales overall, at 425 million. With the number of mobile handset sales up by a mere 0.7% on a year ago, it’s clear that higher-end devices are very the much growth engine for the mobile industry at the moment.
Nearly 75% Of All Smartphones Sold In Q1 Were Android, With Samsung At 30%; Mobile Sales Overall Nearly Flat: Gartner | TechCrunch
Since we love open source hardware hacking as much as we love to share open source code, we decided to team up with the O’Reilly Data Sensing Lab to deploy hundreds of Arduino-based environmental sensors at Google I/O 2013. Using software built with the Google Cloud Platform, we’ll be collecting and visualizing ambient data about the conference, such as temperature, humidity, air quality, in real time! Altogether, the sensors network will provide over 4,000 continuous data streams over a ZigBee mesh network managed by Device Cloud by Etherios.
In addition, our motes will be able to detect fluctuations in noise level, and some will be attached to footstep counters, to understand collective movement around the conference floor. Of course, since a key goal of Google I/O is to promote innovation in the open, the project’s Cloud Platform code, the Arduino hardware designs, and even the data collected, will be open source and available online after the conference.
Cloud Platform Blog: Data Sensing Lab at Google I/O 2013: Google Cloud Platform meets the Internet of Things
Users care about applications and services they use, not operating systems. Very few people will ask you, “Hey, how come MacBooks are on Mac OS-X and iPhone and iPad are on iOS? Why is this?” They think of Apple as iTunes, iCloud, iPhoto. Developers are people, too. They want to write applications one time, but they also want choice. What excites me in this new role is that I can try do the right thing for users and developers — without worrying about the fact that we have two things. We embrace both and we are continuing to invest in both. So in the short run, nothing changes. In the long run, computing itself will dictate the changes. We’re living through a pivotal moment. It’s a world of multiple screens, smart displays, with tons of low-cost computing, with big sensors built into devices. At Google we ask how to bring together something seamless and beautiful and intuitive across all these screens. The picture may look different a year or two from from now, but in the short term, we have Android and we have Chrome, and we are not changing course.
New Android Boss Finally Reveals Plans for World’s Most Popular Mobile OS | Wired Business | Wired.com
But that’s hardly the entire phone market. It’s actually only a fraction of it.
What about those millions of people who have bought Android phones — and some iPhones, probably — who don’t really care that they’re Android phones, or even smartphones?
The types of people who, every couple of years, go into the Verizon or AT&T shop and walk out with whatever newish thing the store rep says they should buy? (All those people who buy Android phones but don’t really show up in usage logs.)
Or even first-time smartphone buyers?
My guess is that many — most? — of these people are Facebook users, and could easily see some utility in having Facebook features highlighted on their phones. And — bonus — Facebook’s software looks good. Much better than the junk that ships with typical low-end Android devices.Boom. Done. Easy, defensible purchase, assuming the price is right.
Facebook isn’t likely to MySpace Android or iOS any time soon. But this is a smart, ambitious project for Facebook. I like it.
http://www.splatf.com/2013/04/facebook-phone-potential/
Still, I think today’s maneuver was a very smart one by Facebook. They’re not forking Android because that implies something bad. They’re spooning with Android, which is fine — nice, even. Never mind the fact that Google probably won’t be too fond of either eventually for the same underlying reasons.
These days, Samsung doesn’t seem to mention Android too often even though they’re so reliant on the OS. But Google seems okay with that as the Search and Play revenues continue to flow in. Similarly, Facebook didn’t mention the Android-maker too often today, and I doubt they will going forward with this and future Facebook Phones. And Google should be okay with that as long as the Search and Play revenues continue to flow in.
But what if Facebook Home eventually swaps out Google Search for the search engine of their investor and close partner, Microsoft? Or what if they put Facebook Search front and center instead? Or what if people search less in general because they just use this device for Facebook services and little else? Or what if Facebook decides to use their own app store instead of Google Play?
Or what if Google, sick of seeing Samsung, Amazon, and now Facebook fondle Android, decides that they want to own the branding of their creation? Again, what if they want to be the “soul of your phone”? There are a lot of variables here going forward.
“It is possible that they go back on their commitment to openness. But I don’t think they will. And it would take a lot of effort,” Zuckerberg said when asked about Google today. That reeks of one of those statements that will come back to haunt. Or maybe he’s just being disingenuous, feigning naiveness — because, again, maybe he’s the thief to Google’s joker.
http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/04/there-is-no-fork/
![(via Google Authorship & Its Insane Impact On Website Traffic [Infographic])](http://25.media.tumblr.com/adc8e45999f43f1d199059020b069a62/tumblr_mkj35xmsAA1r0chnyo1_250.png)
But when I think about who is developing the strongest franchise in mobile, it is obviously Google. They have gmail on so many phones. They have google maps on so many phones. They are getting the majority of searches on mobile phones. And that doesn’t even begin to address Android itself. It is the dominant mobile operating system around the world. Just think about all the data they are getting from this enormous mobile footprint they have assembled.
You can change handsets pretty easily when all your data is in the cloud. There is no moat around a hardware only franchise these days. But the software you choose to use on your phone is different. There the moat is much bigger. And where your data goes in the cloud is even more important. Changing that out requires a major effort for an end user.
So my feeling is that Google is playing the long game in mobile while Apple is missing the cloud piece and Samsung is just a hardware player at this point. And the stock market understands that.
A VC: Short Term Thinking vs Long Term Thinking
Sergey and I first heard about Android back in 2004, when Andy Rubin came to visit us at Google. He believed that aligning standards around an open-source operating system would drive innovation across the mobile industry. Most people thought he was nuts. But his insight immediately struck a chord because at the time it was extremely painful developing services for mobile devices. We had a closet full of more than 100 phones and were building our software pretty much device by device. It was nearly impossible for us to make truly great mobile experiences.
Fast forward to today. The pace of innovation has never been greater, and Android is the most used mobile operating system in the world: we have a global partnership of over 60 manufacturers; more than 750 million devices have been activated globally; and 25 billion apps have now been downloaded from Google Play. Pretty extraordinary progress for a decade’s work. Having exceeded even the crazy ambitious goals we dreamed of for Android—and with a really strong leadership team in place—Andy’s decided it’s time to hand over the reins and start a new chapter at Google. Andy, more moonshots please!
Official Blog: Update from the CEO
Evernote’s also on board, letting you share photos to Skitch. After taking a picture, you can swipe the trackpad over to a Share mode, swipe to Skitch, and tap it to share a picture. Jordan described a scenario where you could take a photo at a meeting using Glass, post it to Skitch, and later on use your tablet to annotate the image and save it to Evernote.
Google reveals Glass apps: New York Times, Evernote, Gmail, and Path | The Verge
Android is different. Android does not really face an addressable market question. 1.7 billion phones will be sold this year, perhaps a little more, and half will be smartphones, and almost all of those that are sold for less than $400 will run Android. In a couple of years, if nothing changes, Android will be selling a billion units a year or more.
The important questions, therefore, are within Android: they are product questions. Something like a third of unit sales are in China and have little access to Google services. What does that mean? Another third to a half of units are sold by Samsung, and all the other branded Android OEMs are struggling. Android is fragmented, Android is very weak in apps for tablets, and so on, and so on. What do all these variations mean? Android is many different things in a way that the iPhone is not, and understanding those variations makes up the analytical challenge.
In other words, product questions are important to understanding Android in a way that they are not to understanding the iPhone. Product questions change what it means to say ‘Android’.
Is that criticism? Negativity? Not really. Android simply went in a different direction, and made different compromises, that’s all. And it has been a huge success. It has brought the mobile Internet, and indeed the internet itself, to hundreds of millions of people. It has only achieved that, really, because of things that look, to high-end users, like flaws to be criticised. It is fragmentation that makes possible the $45 Android phone and the $90 Android tablet. To see what would happen if Android wasn’t in many senses a fragmented chaotic mess, look at Windows Phone. I doubt anyone thinks the world would be a better place if Android had followed the same path.
On bias — Benedict Evans
Pour résumer ce qui a été expliqué plus haut, nous avons deux approches très différentes de l’outil informatique :
le paradigme du XXème siècle, avec des ordinateurs puissants mais coûteux sur lesquels sont stockées les applications et données ;
le paradigme du XXIème siècle, avec des ordinateurs aux ressources limitées et à bas prix, mais qui exploitent des capacités infinies de stockage et de calcul dans les nuages.La promesse de Google est donc de vous faire profiter de ces deux paradigmes : des ordinateurs “légers” qui exploitent les infrastructures distribuées (donc toute la puissance de l’informatique dans les nuages) et qui vous permettent de travailler sur des formats de fichier du siècle dernier, le tout avec une interface tactile et une machine aussi belle qu’un MacBook. C’est donc un coup de maître de la part de Google qui, avec Native Client, parvient à réunir tous les ingrédients nécessaires à la complétion de sa vision de l’informatique du futur :
Des terminaux maîtrisés au niveau hardware et software (les gammes Nexus et Chromebook) ;
Une architecture technique distribuée pour déployer ses offres BtoC et BtoB (Google Drive, Google Apps, Google App Engine…) ;
Un circuit de distribution intégré (Google Apps Marketplace, Google Play Apps Store) ;
Une interface et des applications de consultation / édition / création (Chrome, Chrome OS, QuickOffice).
Avec NaCl, Google complète sa vision de l’informatique du futur « FredCavazza.net FredCavazza.net
Larry Page: I worry that something has gone seriously wrong with the way we run companies. If you read the media coverage of our company, or of the technology industry in general, it’s always about the competition. The stories are written as if they are covering a sporting event. But it’s hard to find actual examples of really amazing things that happened solely due to competition. How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing? That’s why most companies decay slowly over time. They tend to do approximately what they did before, with a few minor changes. It’s natural for people to want to work on things that they know aren’t going to fail. But incremental improvement is guaranteed to be obsolete over time. Especially in technology, where you know there’s going to be non-incremental change.
So a big part of my job is to get people focused on things that are not just incremental. Take Gmail. When we released that, we were a search company—it was a leap for us to put out an email product, let alone one that gave users 100 times as much storage as they could get anywhere else. That is not something that would have happened naturally if we had been focusing on incremental improvements.
Google’s Larry Page on Why Moon Shots Matter | Wired Business | Wired.com
In fact, Google has stressed repeatedly that there will be no ads on Google Glass. “There are no plans for advertising on this device,” says a Google rep. “We’re more interested in making the hardware available.”
But ad execs can dream. Those who make their living via augmented reality have even more vivid dreams. For them, Google Glass isn’t some weird 20% project, it’s the future of advertising. “Stop thinking of [augmented reality] as a business. It’s a browser,” says John Havens, founder of the H(app)athon Project. “If this was 1992 and I told you there was something called a web browser that was going to change advertising, would you believe me? Yet that’s what happened.”
That may not be just wishful thinking. If Google Glass and its imitators take off, it could literally change the way we see the world and the way we interact with brands. Just as the Internet completely overhauled marketing over the past 20 years or so, so can the “Outernet.” In the process we’ll move a step away from the arms-length relationship we consumers have had with brands and a step closer to a consumer-brand mind meld.
How Google Glass Could Change Advertising
Mounting an effective challenge to Google will still be tough, however, because most web searches are for things such as the weather and traffic conditions, where friends’ opinions are irrelevant. (Recognising this, Facebook has turned to Microsoft, whose Bing search engine will answer such queries in the social network’s service.) Moreover, many Facebookers don’t “like” their doctors, dentists, builders and other things that would help make social search more valuable. Without such material, Facebook’s new pillar will be built on a shaky foundation.
Facebook: Search me | The Economist
