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Google Puts the Phone at the Center of Its Multiscreen Universe

google-android-devices

In Google’s perfect world, people have Android tablets in their bags, Android Wear watches strapped to their wrists, Android TV in their living rooms and Android Auto in their cars. In their pockets: An Android phone that ties them all together in a unified experience built on Google services.

Android began as a mobile device platform. But now Google is transforming it into an environment that spans the multiple screens in our lives. Pulling this off will be a complicated exercise of juggling hundreds of Android partners, thousands of developers and billions of users.

Presenting to a crowd of loyal Android developers at Google’s annual I/O conference, Sundar Pichai, head of Google’s Android and Chrome platforms, laid out a vision of how Google’s connected universe would surpass any one company’s strategy, just weeks after Apple articulated its vision of a connected but enclosed world.

“We aren’t building a vertically integrated product,” Pichai said. “What we are doing is building an open platform at scale. We work with hundreds of partners globally to bring a product and a platform that touches billions of people.”

That Android has been so tremendously successful is the reason this interdependency pitch doesn’t sound entirely ludicrous. There were more than one billion Android phones used actively within the last month, Google said today. Android owners check those devices 100 billion times per day. Google paid out $5 billion to developers since the last Google I/O, 13 months ago. And to better encircle the globe, Google is now working to bring sub-$100 Android smartphones to the developing world, starting with the Android One program in India.

Pichai described the four pillars of Google’s new multiscreen world: Experiences that are 1) contextually aware, 2) voice enabled, 3) seamless and 4) mobile first.

The last point – mobile first — is key. Google envisions the Android handset as the brains behind the broader Android ecosystem. It’s portable, powerful and always with you, so your information and settings can be applied across a range of devices and situations. Paired with less robust Android devices — a watch, for example — it allows those devices to deliver an enhanced Android experience.

It's quite possible that the handset will become a stepping stone, and eventually Google will ask people to log into their Google accounts to connect their information and preferences from the cloud. That could come when more devices have their own connectivity and don’t have to tether to a phone to get online. But for today, the phone is the bridge.

In an Android Auto-equipped car, connecting your Android phone through a USB cable will bring up your safety-first Android apps directly on the car’s dashboard display. In newer cars, you’ll be able to use the steering wheel voice button to give commands and the arrows to navigate the screen.

That means voice-enabled Google Maps, complete with local search and live traffic, also appear on the car screen. The driver will be able to send texts via voice while driving, without losing the next turn in maps. Some 25 automakers have signed up to support this experience, with some of the first cars available before the end of the year.

The Android Gear watch strapped to your wrist (Samsung’s and LG’s can be ordered today; Motorola’s will be coming later this summer) and connected to your phone via Bluetooth will automatically unlock your phone if it is nearby.

Sundar Pichai

Asa Mathat Sundar Pichai

The wrist display is viewed as a miniature phone interface that helps you get things done quickly. Android engineering director David Singleton demonstrated how you can order a pizza in less than 20 seconds using the Eat24 app for his Android smartwatch.

“When it comes to takeout, I’m a creature of habit,” Singleton said. “At the same time I ordered last week, it posts a notification suggesting I order again. I can quickly swipe to see my last order, just one more tap to pay, and the pizza’s on its way.”

In your living room, your Android phone will serve as an extension to your Android TV set-top box or upcoming Android-equipped televisions from Sony and Sharp next year. You will be able to say “Breaking Bad” and be shown a menu where the latest episode will be available or go deeper and seek out other related videos and interviews of the cast. Too lazy to speak? Change the channel with your Android Wear watch.

None of this is particularly novel. Voice search is a marquee feature of Amazon’s new Fire TV set-top box. Apple’s CarPlay is designed for the same driving scenarios Google hopes to address with Android Auto and has many of the same partners.

But novelty isn’t Google’s ambition. The ubiquity of its services is. And to achieve that goal, it needs to deliver the “open platform at scale” that Pichai described. Whether that is a recipe for success or a new challenge to untangle is unclear. But it is a sketch of where Google is headed next.

More Google I/O Coverage

Circle Internet Financial’s Jeremy Allaire Talks Up Some Bitcoin (Video)

Circle Internet Financial logo

Recently, I had longtime tech entrepreneur Jeremy Allaire for a visit at Re/code Global HQ to talk about his latest startup, Circle Internet Financial.

The digital currency company just raised $17 million, for a total of $26 million from a range of venture capitalists and other investors.

So what does Circle do for all this cash? It’s betting on cash-killer bitcoin, of course!

As Jason Del Rey noted in a recent post:

Circle is a website where people can purchase and store bitcoin. Users can also send bitcoin to other individuals or to a company that accepts bitcoin as a form of payment. Other new companies do similar things, but mostly charge for some piece of their service.

Coinbase, for example, lets people buy bitcoin, but the company charges a one percent fee to do so. A new startup called Xapo will store your bitcoin data and backup data in physical locked vaults, but charges a small fee for that privilege.

Circle is choosing not to charge for anything. Its goal is to get as many people familiar with bitcoin as possible by making it easier to sign up and use bitcoin.

Early days, but here’s my video interview with Allaire — who created the publicly traded online video company Brightcove — talking about it all:

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Rage Against the Doodle! (Comic)

Joy of Tech 2015

Oculus Demands Jury Trial in Dispute With ZeniMax

oculus-couch-knights

Eric Johnson

Oculus doesn’t appear interested in settling the intellectual property lawsuit brought against it by game publisher ZeniMax.

In a new filing in a northern Texas district court, the virtual reality company and Facebook subsidiary reiterated that its CTO, John Carmack, co-founder of ZeniMax subsidiary Id Software, did not misuse any information proprietary to ZeniMax in his work on early versions of the Oculus Rift headset. It goes on to say the ZeniMax “appeared to have lost whatever interest it had in VR” until after Facebook spent $2 billion on Oculus.

“ZeniMax never claimed ownership rights over the Rift based on any supposed contribution to any technology in the Rift, because ZeniMax knew it had made none,” the filing says.

The filing also provides more detail on the vaguely worded non-disclosure agreement signed by Carmack and Oculus founder Palmer Luckey and previously leaked by a person close to the matter. The NDA, it notes, was in response to a “VR Testbed,” an incomplete game made by Carmack to be used for virtual reality testing:

The NDA was unnecessary because the VR Testbed consisted of nothing but a binary executable file from a small portion of one videogame that Carmack had adapted to test HMD [head-mounted display] devices, together with related art assets. Regardless, the parties never finalized the NDA, which omitted key terms defining what use Luckey could make of the VR Testbed he received. And, of course, Oculus did not even exist at the time Luckey signed the NDA document.

Oculus declined to comment further.

Google I/O, by the Numbers

GoogleIO

Vjeran Pavic

Some of the key figures from Google's I/O developer conference keynote this morning:

Android activations: In 2013, Google saw 900 million activations of Android devices. For comparison, it had it had 60 million activations in 2010, 100 million in 2011 and 400 million in 2012. The Android platform now boasts a billion monthly active users. People check their Android phones a total of 100 billion times each day, and according to Google Senior Vice President Sundar Pichai, there are 93 million selfies taken every day on Android.

Android tablets: Two years ago, Android tablets accounted for 39 percent of market share. Last year, that number was 46 percent. This year, Android tablets represent 62 percent of the global market. (Note: These are shipment numbers being used as indicators of predicted usage.) A year ago, 28 percent of tablet usage on YouTube was Android; now it's 42 percent.

Google Play: Pichai told the audience that 93 percent of Google Play subscribers had the latest version of the service installed.

Google Chrome: At the beginning of 2013, there were 27 million active users on Chrome for mobile. Today, there are over 300 million.

Games and Google: Three out of four Android users play games. Google has paid out $5 billion to developers since last year's I/O.

Google Drive: Google Drive has 190 million monthly active users, marking 85 percent growth over the past year. Among the users of Google Drive are 67 of the top 100 startups, 58 percent of the Fortune 500 and 72 top universities.

More Google I/O Coverage

The Talk Show: ‘Oh Man, Soccer’

New episode of my podcast, with special guest star Paul Kafasis. Topics include the ongoing World Cup and the sport of soccer, Google Glass, mockups of devices in rumor reports, Amazon's Fire Phone, the New York Times's profile of Tim Cook last week, Apple's growth, and the agonizingly slow death of Blackberry. Lastly, Paul brings up a devilishly tricky question regarding whether Apple will support a particular new addition to the Emoji specification.

Google Design

By far my favorite thing announced at I/O today, this new set of design guidelines describing a universal design language for web and mobile apps is really very well conceived. This is the first time, ever, that Android has looked to me like a nice platform to use or to design software for.

Pre-Matias Duarte, Android was a horrid mess. Post-Duarte attempts at improving Android’s design were lipstick on a pig — taking something badly designed and trying to make it look better. This though, seems like a thoughtful, pleasing, ground-up design framework — something that finally feels like it came from the same mind that brought us the delightful WebOS.

If there’s a hitch, it’s that Google seems to be promoting this as a cross-platform design framework — a way to design just one interface for both iOS and Android. Google’s own apps for iOS already feel like weird moon man apps; now they’re encouraging third-party developers to follow their style rather than iOS’s.

Volvo and Honda Cars to Be Cross-Compatible With Both iOS CarPlay and Android Auto

Volvo answers a question I had about CarPlay and Android Auto:

Volvo Cars will also include Apple CarPlay interoperability in all new models based on the new Scalable Product Architecture. This will make it possible for Volvo car drivers to connect the most widely used smartphone platforms directly to their car's touch screen display.

9to5Mac reports that Honda and Hyundai systems will be cross-compatible as well.

Sony and PlayStation TV

The most surprising (to me) part of Google’s Android TV announcement today was that Sony would be integrating it into their 2015 TV sets. Why in the world would Sony agree to integrate what is obviously a direct competitor to Playstation TV in its own TV sets?

‘Sixth Time’s the Charm’

Joanna Stern and Wilson Rothman, writing for the WSJ, take a look at today’s Android TV announcement and review Google’s track record with previous TV endeavors.

Eli Wallach Dies at 98

Fantastic career. “When you have to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk.”

Google Introduces New Gmail API

Eric DeFriez, Google technical lead for Gmail APIs:

For a while now, many of you have been asking for a better way to access data to build apps that integrate with Gmail. While IMAP is great at what it was designed for (connecting email clients to email servers in a standard way), it wasn't really designed to do all of the cool things that you have been working on, which is why this week at Google I/O, we're launching the beta of the new Gmail API.

Designed to let you easily deliver Gmail-enabled features, this new API is a standard Google API, which gives RESTful access to a user's mailbox under OAuth 2.0 authorization. It supports CRUD operations on true Gmail datatypes such as messages, threads, labels and drafts.

Is this the beginning of the end for IMAP and SMTP access to Gmail?

Mike Wehner on Today’s Google I/O Keynote

Mike Wehner, writing for The Daily Dot:

Google spent a good deal of time talking Android, showing the developers in the crowd some new UI elements they'll be able to use in future apps, along with still-in-development versions of new software for in-car entertainment systems and TVs, named Android Auto and Android TV, respectively.

Then came a string of demos that Google probably wishes it could redo, including apps that wouldn't load, a game graphics demo that was flickering and repeatedly cut out, and a coding example that had to be attempted three times before it displayed properly. It was all very strange, and the awkward mumbling from the audience whenever something broke certainly didn't help matters.

After two hours of technical talk, with nary a mention of new hardware or consumer-level software, the attendees began to get a bit bored. It was at this point that Twitter briefly became a strange meta-I/O, with dozens, or perhaps hundreds of attendees hopping on their Twitter accounts to talk about how bad the show was — while it was still going on.

I watched the live stream, and agree with Wehner’s assessment. After the first 45 minutes or so (during which there were some truly interesting announcements), the whole thing just fell apart. Disorganized, unrehearsed, and worst of all: boring.

Now imagine if Apple held a WWDC keynote like this, and the shit storm that would ensue. The reactions would be apoplectic. There’d be pundits calling for Tim Cook to be fired. On the other hand, the fact that Apple never holds events this bad, never wastes time or attention like this, is a huge factor why Apple keynotes garner so much more attention than those of any other company. They deserve it.

Anyone know where my Kindle is?

Anyone know where my Kindle is?

One Month Raises $770K To Teach All Of The Coding

shutterstock_133610258 What did you accomplish in the past 30 days? If you’re a student at One Month (Formerly One Month Rails), you could have a fully functional web application. Yesterday, the Y Combinator-backed company announced it closed a seed round of $770K to bring accelerated programming instruction to the masses. YC led the round, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst,… Read More

Watch Our Wrap-Up Of The Google I/O Keynote And Day One

img_00151 Google’s I/O developer conference kicked off today, and the company held its keynote address to give an overview of all the news it revealed at the event. The changes included a preview of the upcoming version of Android, dubbed “L” for now, which brings a new design paradigm to Google’s OS that helps it work across different types of screens and devices. Read More

US Promises EU Citizens Stronger Data Privacy Rights

4734054314_1cda1e7f4b_o The Obama administration has committed to pass legislation granting European Union citizens some of the same privacy rights as Americans in U.S. courts, The Guardian reported Wednesday. The U.S. has completed negotiations on an agreement that will grant EU citizens with the right to seek reparation in U.S. courts if personal data their home countries share with the U.S. government for law… Read More

Hands On With Google’s Incredibly Clever Cardboard Virtual Reality Headset

Each year at I/O, Google gives all of the developers in the audience a gift. Some years it’s a tablet. Some years it’s a laptop. This year? It was a piece of cardboard. Yeah, yeah, they gave attendees some other stuff, too — but that cardboard! It’s amazing, and I’ve got an extra one to give away. Read More

Hands On With The Samsung Gear Live, Its $199 Smartwatch Shipping July 7

samsung-gear-live Samsung has a new Android Wear device that it didn’t really make too much of a fuss about before: The Gear Live smartwatch. It unsurprisingly resembles its brethren the Gear, Gear 2 and Gear Neo, but it doesn’t use Tizen or Android (like the first gen Gear) and it doesn’t use the same interface Samsung has been pushing on its other wearable devices. It does however bring… Read More
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