Google News
Megan Ko
Acer offered a preview of its upcoming Stream smartphone at a press conference in Beijing on Thursday.
The Stream has a unique screen layout, using its status bar as a divider between application icons at the bottom of the screen and application history at the top. Applications like Facebook, the Twidroid Twitter client, Spinlets, and Nemo player will come preinstalled on the phone.
Running Google’s Android 2.1 operating system, the Stream has a 1GHz Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm, 512MB of RAM, 2GB of internal Flash memory, and comes bundled with an 8GB memory card. The phone has a 3.7-inch AMOLED (Active Matrix Light Emitting Diode) touchscreen and can playback high-definition 720p video on a high-definition TV via an HDMI output.
The handset is 11.2 millimeters thick and comes with all of the wireless capabilities and goodies you’d expect on a smartphone: Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access) with download speeds up to 7.2 Mbps, a 5-megapixel camera, and a GPS.
The Stream will be available during the second half of this year. Pricing was not disclosed.
Jeremy Kirk
Google has released a Web browser add-on that will stop the browser from sending information to the Google Analytics service, which Web sites can use to collect data about their visitors.
Google said it developed the tool “to provide website visitors with more choice about how their data is collected.”
Web site owners can incorporate Google’s Analytics JavaScript code on their site to collect data such as when a person visited a Web site, if the person has been there before and the search terms a person used to find the Web site.
Analytics creates a cookie on a person’s computer. Cookies are small data files used to record information about how a person interacts with a Web site.
Google’s new tool, the Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on, tells the Analytics JavaScript that information on the Web site visit should not be sent to Analytics.
There are other tools for Firefox users that can block Analytics. Adblock Plus and NoScript can both be set to prevent Google Analytics from receiving any information from the browser, while OptimizeGoogle blocks the Google Analytics cookie in addition to modifying other aspects of Google’s behavior, including blocking Google advertisements and modifying the user ID cookie Google assigns to users of its search engine so that they can surf anonymously. Other cookie-management tools can also block the Google Analytics cookie, but won’t stop Google Analytics from receiving more general information including the IP address of the Web user and the address of the page containing the Google Analytics tracking code.
Google Analytics collects the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of Web site visitors but does not report the full address back to the site using Analytics. Google says that Web site operators can collect the IP addresses of visitors regardless of whether they use Analytics.
IP addresses can be used to identify a computer connected to the Internet and are regarded by some privacy advocates as personal information. While an IP address does not identify an individual user, it can be used by a service provider to identify a broadband subscriber.
The Analytics add-on does not stop Google from putting other cookies on a computer, such as its DoubleClick cookie, which tracks the Web pages a person visits and then serves advertisements related to that content.
The Analytics Opt-out add-on is compatible with Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Chrome version 4 and higher and Firefox version 3.5 and higher.
Users spent more than 4.8 million hours of time playing Google’s free Pac-Man game May 21, a time suck that could have cost companies nearly $120.5 million, according to time management tool RescueTime. The time management provider said Pac-Man ate up 4,819,352 hours of time beyond the 33.6 million daily manhours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day. The numbers should give some employers pause to wonder what their worker bees are doing in the hive.
Users spent more than 4.8 million hours of time playing Google’s free Pac-Man game Friday, a time suck that could have cost companies nearly $120.5 million, according to time management tool RescueTime.
Google last Friday released its Pac-Man game as a playable doodle logo, allowing users to click the insert coin button and begin gobbling ghosts with the hungry, yellow dot.
Google pledged to leave up the doodle only through the weekend, but the Atari and arcade favorite proved so popular that the search engine agreed to offer it forever at its own Web page here.
RescueTime crunched some numbers and found that the average Google users spent 36 seconds more on Google.com, which is where the original Pac-Man game was hosted.
For the baseline, the company said the average Google user spends only 4 and a half active minutes on Google search per day, conducting 22 page views. This is equal to roughly 11 seconds of attention invested in each Google page view.
Looking at a random subset of its users, or 11,000 people spending 3 million seconds on Google.com Friday, the average user spent 36 seconds more on Google.com Friday. RescueTime concluded Pac-Man is the reason for the gross time bump.
“Thankfully, Google tossed out the logo with pretty low ‘perceived affordance’—they put an ‘insert coin’ button next to the search button, but I imagine most users missed that,” RescueTime founder Tony Wright said May 24.
“In fact, I’d wager that 75% of the people who saw the logo had no idea that you could actually play it. Which the world should be thankful for.”
Taking Wolfram Alpha’s tally that Google had some 504,703,000 unique visitors on Sunday, May 23, RescueTime said Pac-Man ate up 4,819,352 hours of time beyond the 33.6 million daily manhours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day.
Pac-Man consumed $120,483,800 in costs for the lost work time, where the average Google user is paid $25 per hour. If the Pac-Man players had an approximate cost of the average Google employee, the tally goes to $298,803,988.
The numbers should give some employers pause to wonder what their worker bees are doing in the hive.
By the same token, these stats might push Google to offer more classic Atari games on its Website. Our vote for the next game goes to Centipede.
Dear Google,
I try not to write too many of these open letters because, well, they’re a gimmicky way to hook readers on a Monday after a long week of news. But your relative silence since last Friday’s revelation that you collected personal data from unsecured Wi-Fi hot spots all over the globe shows you are underestimating the slow burn this incident has sparked among your user base, otherwise known as basically everybody on the Internet.
This isn’t like Facebook exposing the pictures from your 5-year college reunion, the one where you learned that no, you can no longer funnel beers quite so easily. This is every modern privacy advocate’s worst nightmare and every Google critic’s fantasy: the most information-hungry company the world has ever known has gotten caught going a little too far.
Sure, you claim the data collected as part of the Street View project was random and not necessarily identifiable. And yes, you were the one to notify the world what you had done, blaming it on an inadvertent oversight. Still, your blog post on the matter raises more questions than it answers.
For example, why did a Google engineer ever write code that was designed to, in your words, “(sample) all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data”? For what possible reason could such comprehensive code be used other than to collect payload data from unsecured wireless access points?
You said you never used any of this data to help build or refine Google products. How do you know that? If this data was kept completely and totally separate from benign data gathered as part of the Street View project, how did you not realize that you were gathering this type of data years ago? It’s hard to believe that any form of data–the lifeblood of Google–could get tossed in the digital equivalent of a garage closet for years and forgotten.
It’s not enough to admit in the precise words of your co-founder that “we screwed up.” Pushing the boundaries and then apologizing after the fact is a business strategy that can only work for so long; you can’t fool all the people all the time.
Google collects more data on personal activities than just about anyone outside of the credit card industry, and most of the time that data improves your products and services. Yet your data-hungry culture can at times appear out of step with the mainstream world, and your tendency to brush off concerns about what your company might do with that data and how it protects that data troubles many who would otherwise see your company in the brightest of lights.
In 2003, the New York Times faced up to one of the worst crises in its history–the Jayson Blair fraud scandal–by publishing a thorough account of what had happened, how internal conditions at the paper allowed it to happen, and what would be done to prevent this from happening again. The painful exercise was cathartic for Times writers and readers, and went a long way toward restoring trust in one of America’s best news organizations.
You call yourself a company committed to openness and transparency? Prove it.
Publish a detailed account of why this Wi-Fi software was created, how it was allowed to permeate a high-profile Google project for several years, and what Google employees knew about the collection of this data. I know you love to remind critics of your data gathering that users have control over their data through features like Google Dashboard, but Google Dashboard only gives the user control over the data that Google tells that user they’re gathering.
It would be a grave mistake to let this matter go much further. Already governments skeptical of your power are licking their chops over this issue, and the lawsuits are also mounting.
You may be tempted to let the whole thing blow over and wait for Facebook to screw up some other privacy-related matter this week, diverting the nanosecond attention spans of the tech media and its readers. Don’t.
Earn back the trust you have so often stated is the contract between the users of your free services and your engineers. Explain clearly what was collected, how it will be deleted, and how this will never happen again.
Collecting data that users of your services submit willingly to the Internet is one thing. Driving the streets of the world and absorbing packets of data that come your way–no matter how inadvertent it may have been–is quite another.
Sincerely
“Hopefully phone owners won’t have to wait four more months for the next installment.”
That’s the ending to the big Android 2.2 analysis we pushed up three days ago. And that’s even the line that Google itself was touting at its recent I/O conference—”Android 2.2 will be here soon, and some devices will get the update in the coming weeks,” wrote Android SDK Tech Lead Xavier Ducrohet in a blog post.
Well, surprise! Owners of Google’s Nexus One began receiving updates for Android 2.2—nicknamed “Froyo”—starting this past weekend, heralded by an email from Google itself stating that, “The roll out to Nexus One devices has begun!”
According to TechCrunch’s MG Siegler, it appears that members of the press are getting first dibs on the new version of Google’s mobile operating system. The rollout to Froyo is staggered, which should come as little surprise for those following Google’s new service launches.
If you’re impatient, you can follow Rob Jackson’s steps for manually installing Froyo on your handheld device of choice. That’s assuming, of course, that you’re rocking a T-Mobile Nexus One. The trick doesn’t seem to be working with AT&T-based or Sprint phones at the moment—or at least, it doesn’t work without a large amount of custom modifications.
So what, then, do you get should you make the automatic or manual plunge to Android 2.2? In addition to portable Wi-Fi hotspot capabilities and 3G tethering, the mobile OS is getting a kick in the performance department and its first-ever support for Flash 10.1 (if your phone is packing an ARM Cortex-A8 processor, at least).
Additional enterprise support is coming to Froyo-backed phones in the form of Exchange-based account auto-discovery and calendar synchronization, as well as remote wipe capabilities, global address list look-ups, and support for numeric pin or alpha-numeric password policies.
“New data backup APIs enable apps to participate in data backup and restore, allowing an application’s last data to be restored when installed on a new or a reset device,” writes Ducrohet. “Apps can utilize Android Cloud to Device Messaging to enable mobile alert, send to phone, and two-way push sync functionality.”
“Developers can now declare whether their app should be installed on internal memory or an SD card,” he adds.
For the full analysis of Froyo’s litany of features, be sure to check out our hands-on guide to Google’s latest OS iteration.
Due to overwhelming popularity , Google has announced that its interactive 30th anniversary Pac-Man doodle has earned a permanent spot on Google.com. From now on, whenever you need a Pac-Man fix just point your browser to Google.com/pacman and you can enjoy the search giant’s version of this iconic video game any time you like.
While you’ve been able to find online versions of Pac-Man for years, Google users were thrilled to find a working version of the video game designed as Google’s logo on Friday.
Google posted the homepage doodle in celebration of Pac-Man’s 30th anniversary, and the game was only supposed to remain available for 48 hours. But enthusiastic user feedback to “Pac-Google” inspired the search giant to rethink its plans. Numerous sites popped up offering free downloads of Google’s Pac-Man for those who wanted to keep their own copy once Google took the game offline. Twitter users cracked jokes about how Google had killed U.S. productivity on Friday by putting the game (including all 256 levels) across the screens of millions of office workers. There were even suggestions that Google’s JavaScript-based Pac-Man was a subtle jab at Apple CEO Steve Jobs .
When Namco and Midway games introduced Pac-Man to North America in 1980 it quickly became a fixture in American popular culture. Pac-Man inspired numerous video game spin-offs, board games, lunch boxes, a Saturday morning cartoon and several versions for home video game systems.
Despite the overwhelming user reaction to Google’s 30th anniversary doodle, I have no doubt Pac-Man fever will start receding over the next few days. But never fear, once this version of Pac-Man is forgotten, I have no doubt it will live on as fodder for those always popular articles detailing Google’s best Easter Eggs of all time.
According to Google, the Android 2.2 mobile OS update will arrive later this year. Among the highlights described by Google at this week’s Google I/O Conference in San Francisco, here are five that make Android 2.2 shine:
1. Faster Speeds: According to Google, Android 2.2 is as much as five times faster than previous versions. That’s thanks to a Dalvik JIT compiler to boost CPU performance, Google said, and a JavaScript engine.
2. Tethering, Hot-Spot Support: As was heavily rumored in the weeks leading up to Google I/O, Android 2.2 includes built-in support for tethering and the ability to use Android phones as Wi-Fi hot spots. Questions remain about whether carriers of Android phones will charge users for the services, but they’re there for Android.
3. Flash Support: Android 2.2 is the first version of Google Android that can fully support both Adobe Flash and Adobe Air. Adobe is a key relationship for Google, and at Google’s I/O Conference Google Vice President of Engineering Vic Gundotra didn’t waste an opportunity to needle Apple and its very public war of words with Adobe.
“It turns out that on the Internet, people use Flash,” he said. “And part of being open means you’re inclusive, rather than exclusive, and that you’re open to innovation.”
4. SD Card, App Backup: Both are space-adders: Users can now install Android apps right on an SD card or using an Android phone’s internal storage. Another new function lets users back up and restore Android apps data.
5. Microsoft Exchange Support And Other Messaging Options: Lost amid a lot of the hype around Android 2.2’s most expected features was another nugget that might make Android phones more appealing to enterprises: support forMicrosoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Exchange. What’s more, Android now includes a cloud-to-device messaging feature that lets users more easily move information between Google applications on the Web and their various devices.
This week, Google subtly noted that Android 2.3 “Gingerbread” is set for a Q4 2010 release.
The date was shown off inside the FAQ for the new WebM video format. Google’s latest update, 2.2 “Froyo” is expected to be launched today at the I/O conference, which is now in its second day.
WebM is Google’s new open source video codec, built on the VP8 codec that was originally developed by On2. Last year, Google purchased On2 for $124 million USD. For audio, the codec uses open source Ogg Vorbis.
The open source codec is Google’s answer to the current HTML5 video format war. HTML5 allows for native video embedding in web pages, removing the need for plug-ins like Adobe’s Flash or Microsoft’s Silverlight. The standard does not specify which format will be used, and that has led to Apple and Microsoft pushing the expensive H.264 format, while Google, Opera, and Mozilla among others are pushing for free, open source formats.
Widespread smartphone HTML5 support is not expected for some time, adds MobileBurn, but Android users will likely see the start of strong support with “Gingerbread.”
Ian Paul
Google may be getting ready to launch its fabled Google TV set-top box during the company’s Google I/O developer conference on Thursday, according to the latest rumors. The search giant may also make an Android announcement, possibly introducing Android 2.2, the next iteration of Google’s smartphone OS.
Google already made some interesting announcements during the company’s first I/O keynote address on Wednesday, and while at first glance some of Google’s announcements appear to be directed at developers, these new technologies and products will also impact consumers.
Here’s a quick look at Wednesday’s highlights as well as a brief preview of Thursday morning’s rumored announcements.
Chrome Web App Store
What it is: Google is launching an online store for Web apps built with standard Web tools and technologies. Applications that Google showed off at I/O include popular applications like the Twitter client Tweetdeck, games like Plants vs. Zombies, and a digital version of Sports Illustrated.
Why it matters: Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock for the past few years, it should be pretty clear to you that technology companies are obsessed with apps these days. Prompted by the success of Apple’s iPhone, and now the iPad, smartphone makers and carriers are falling over themselves to provide downloadable apps for their customers. Google wants to replicate this success and bring apps into the cloud, by making robust applications available to any device that uses a modern Web browser. This is yet another attempt by Google to make cloud computing mainstream, and will complement the search giant’s upcoming Chrome OS platform for laptops and netbooks.
Google Wave
What it is: Google has taken Google Wave–the company’s real-time, cloud-based collaboration software– out of its preview phase and made Wave open to all users .
Why it matters: Despite the fact that Google Wave fell off the radar for most people since its launch during Google I/O 2009 , the collaborative platform does have potential and has become more usable since its initial launch. Whether or not Wave will revolutionize collaborative work for users in remote locations is unclear, but there’s definitely potential for Wave to be a bigger success than it currently is.
WebM video format
What it is: WebM is a new open-source, royalty video format that Google is putting forward as a possible standard for the coming video tag in HTML 5. WebM features the VP8 video codec, the Vorbis audio codec, and the Matroska media container. Basically, this means the video images (VP8) and the audio that accompanies the video (Vorbis) are packaged together in the Matroska file format. Matroska files have the file extension .mkv.
Why it matters: VP8 plays into the Adobe vs. Apple fight over Flash, which is really a battle over the future of Web video. Right now, various technology companies and groups are vying for their preferred video codec to become the universal standard used in HTML 5, the newest version of the computer language that governs the Web. HTML 5’s proposed video tags would make embedding video into a Web page as easy as embedding an image or lines of text.
The problem is that no one can agree on which video codec to universally support, and different browsers are supporting different video codecs. Mozilla supports Ogg Theora, Apple supports h.264, Microsoft in Internet Explorer 9 will support h.264 and VP8, Opera supports Ogg Theora and will support VP8, and Google Chrome supports Ogg Theora, h.264 and now VP8.
This fractured landscape is a nightmare for Web developers since it would be impractical and expensive to encode so many different video types for different browsers. If this situation continues, developers would be unlikely to move away from universal video plugins like Flash, and this reluctance to change could ultimately slow down the development of HTML 5 and future Web innovations.
Google App Engine for Businesses
What it is: Google is opening up a cloud-based platform that allows businesses to create Web-based applications for internal use.
Why it matters: While this announcement may not directly affect most users it’s an interesting move by Google and shows just how important the enterprise market is to Google’s vision for a world filled with cloud-based apps.
Google TV
What it is: Google TV is a rumored set-top box that would bring Web functionality to your living room TV. Google will reportedly unveil this new device soon, possibly during Thursday’s second Google I/O keynote starting at 11:30 a.m. Eastern/8:30 a.m. Pacific on Thursday–you can watch the keynote live on YouTube .
Why it matters: Google TV could be yet another failed attempt to bring the Web to your television, but this project is rumored to have the backing of heavy hitters like Sony, Intel and Logitech. So will Google and its friends be the first company to popularize the Web on your TV? Hopefully we’ll get a preview of Google’s TV plans soon.
Along with Thursday’s rumored Google TV announcement, today’s keynote may also bring some significant Android news, according to TechCrunch . Will Froyo, a.k.a. Android 2.2, make an appearance? Only a few hours until we find out for sure.
The heat is being turned up on Google over its recent WiFi data collection incident. Two members of Congress have now sent a letter to the FTC asking a series of questions about how Google’s actions might be covered by federal law and what actions the FTC might take. The letter is short and sweet, but it shows that there is growing concern in Congress over Google’s “mistake.”
The letter, signed by Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) and Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), first asks if the FTC has begun investigating the issue and what the Commission’s understanding is of the type of data collected. Who had access to the data? Did Google collect people’s passwords? Did the company violate the public’s expectation of privacy? Were Google’s actions illegal?
These are all questions that the two congressmen want the FTC to answer by June 2. Of course, they’re not the only ones asking the FTC to take a look into Google’s gaffe—earlier this week, public interest group Consumer Watchdog also called on the agency to investigate Google’s “flagrant intrusion into consumers’ privacy.” German authorities have also demanded that Google hand over the hard drives it used to store the data.
Google’s voluntary admission definitely touched a sensitive nerve with lawmakers and the public alike, and the company is now paying the price—at least in terms of increased scrutiny. The search giant has arguably been walking on thin ice when it comes to perceptions of how it protects its users’ privacy, but in this case, it may have softened the blow (slightly) by coming out about the “mistake” before anyone else noticed.
Update: Google’s data collection mistake is now also the subject of a class action lawsuit out of Oregon. The plaintiffs alleged that “hundreds if not thousands of Google employees throughout the United States and the world have access to data maintained on Google’s servers.”
Italy has started an investigation into Google Inc’s Street View web service, a local watchdog said on Wednesday following the U.S. group’s announcement it had accidentally collected personal data over wireless networks.
Google said last week its fleets of cars which have been photographing streets around the world had for several years accidentally collected personal information — which a security expert said could include e-mail messages and passwords.
Italy’s privacy regulator said it would verify whether Google treated correctly the data acquired by Street View, which allows users to navigate around a 360-degree view of city streets using pictures taken by Google’s camera vehicles.
The regulator said Google Italy had admitted it collected pictures but also “data regarding the presence of wireless networks … as well as electronic communications, eventually transmitted by users via unprotected wireless networks.”
Asked for comment, a Google Italy spokeswoman referred to Friday’s statement that Google was approaching regulators in the affected countries about how to dispose of the data, which Google said it never used.
Google Inc., owner of the most-used Web search engine, is teaming up with Intel Corp. to get its software onto televisions in a bid to succeed where rival Apple Inc. has struggled.
At a conference that starts today, Mountain View, California-based Google plans to announce a partnership with Intel and Sony Corp. that will put Android software on TV sets and other home-entertainment equipment, people familiar with the matter said earlier this month.
Google aims to expand beyond the online advertising business that makes up almost all its sales, while benefiting from rising demand for Web-connected TVs. Apple says it has had “small” sales of its own Internet-television device, calling the effort a “hobby.” There’s no guarantee Google can make deeper inroads, said Altimeter Group analyst Michael Gartenberg.
“It’s no slam dunk,” said Gartenberg, whose firm is based in San Mateo, California. “This is a place where lots of people have tried and not gained a whole lot of traction.”
Sony, based in Tokyo, will tap the new home-entertainment devices to stem losses in its TV division. The arrangement helps Santa Clara, California-based Intel get its processors into electronics other than computers.
Google fell $2.67 to $495.70 at 9:59 a.m. New York time in Nasdaq Stock Market trading. The shares had dropped 20 percent this year before today. Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker declined to comment, as did Intel spokesman Bill Calder and Sony spokesman John Dolak.
‘First Brick’
Google, which has the biggest share of the $60.4 billion online advertising market, broadened into smartphones through the Android mobile operating system. Adding TVs would give it a toehold in the $174.9 billion television advertising market.
“This is a new frontier for Google,” said Ray Valdes, an analyst at Gartner Inc. “It’s a return to traditional mass media concepts.”
To attract consumers, Google will need to provide a broad variety of easily searchable programming and let viewers chat or post comments about it online, on a single screen, Valdes said.
Google also needs to land content partnerships to make its service attractive to more than just technology-savvy consumers, he said. “They are laying down the first brick in the foundation,” Valdes said. “The brick has to do with hardware and software and geek topics. If they stop there they’re not going to go very far.”
Apple TV, unveiled in 2007, is a set-top box that lets users access content from the Internet and iTunes and display it on widescreen TVs. Apple doesn’t break out sales of Apple TV.
‘Small’ Unit Sales
Chief Executive Officer Steve Jobs and Chief Operating Officer Tim Cook both call it a “hobby” compared with Apple’s other products, which include the Macintosh computer, iPhone wireless handset and iPod digital music player.
“The absolute number of units are still small,” Cook told analysts on April 20 after the company reported earnings.
Part of Apple’s challenge may be that it requires consumers to buy a separate box to hook up to their televisions, said Paul Gray, an analyst at researcher DisplaySearch. Google may avoid that setback by including its software directly in the hardware.
“In the end, this is kind of a stealth sale,” Gray said. “The consumer is unaware of what’s going on. It just does it. That’s the way to go.”
Demand for Web-connected sets is gaining. An estimated 46 percent of flat-panel TVs will ship with Internet connections in 2013, up from an estimated 19 percent this year, according to ABI Research Inc. Companies such as Yahoo Inc! now offer software for makers that want to provide Web-enabled sets.
Google’s Turf
“The TV manufacturers are starting to look at this as a checklist, or checkbox for Internet connectivity,” said Jason Blackwell, an analyst at ABI Research in Oyster Bay, New York.
Consumers also are warming to Internet content on TV. About one in eight people in a recent Yankee Group survey said they may end or curtail pay TV services in favor of online content.
Google’s prowess in organizing information will help it address consumer frustration over slow on-screen guides and search features ill-equipped to handle the multiplicity of channels and ways of getting programming, said Carl Howe and analyst at Yankee Group in Boston.
“In many ways TV has wandered into Google’s space,” Howe said. “You didn’t need search when there were three stations. If you could change channels in a tenth of a second rather than one to two seconds that would attract a lot of people.”
Nudging Apple Aside
Google already has moved beyond search on the personal computer with Android on smartphones. In the first quarter, Android replaced Apple as the No. 2 operating system on U.S. smartphones, gaining 28 percent market share, according to NPD Group in Port Washington, New York. Apple had 21 percent, while Research In Motion Ltd.’s BlackBerry led with 36 percent.
“From what we’ve seen from the smartphone categories, Google is sort of well-positioned for that in terms of creating a developer base and a base of applications that will then provide some reason for the consumers to look for the devices,” ABI’s Blackwell said.
To make money from TV software, Google might deliver ads based on what a viewer does on the Web while they’re watching television, he said. Google also could simply provide more general video ads as a broadcaster would, he added.
This year television ad spending will reach $174.9 billion, almost three times the total spent online, according to market researcher ZenithOptimedia Group Ltd. in the U.K.
“Google has made no secret that it wants all screens to be connected — it wants them to be connected to Google services,” Altimeter’s Gartenberg said. “You don’t want to ignore the TV set as part of that vision.”
Worldwide mobile phone sales increased 17 percent in the first quarter of 2010 over the same period last year, and some of the biggest sales momentum came behind smartphones, especially those made byResearch In Motion (NSDQ: RIMM) (RIM) and those running Google’s Android OS.
That was the word from Gartner, which on Wednesday reported that RIM cracked the top five mobile device manufacturers by worldwide market share for the first time, and that momentum for Android — and Apple — has continued as well. Apple increased its worldwide market share by 1.2 percent from last quarter, according to Gartner, and sales of Android-based phones were up by 707 percent from the first quarter of 2009.
Overall worldwide sales of mobile phones in the first quarter were 314.7 million units, Gartner noted, and smartphones accounted for 17.3 percent of those sales, up from 13.6 percent smartphone sales in the first quarter of 2009.
“In the first quarter of 2010, smartphone sales to end users saw their strongest year-on-year increase since 2006,” said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner, in a statement. Smartphones grew in double digits, she noted, spurring growth especially in mature markets thanks to the wider availability of cheaper phones.
Gartner’s report also noted that the world’s top five mobile handset manufacturers saw their combined market share drop from 73.3 percent a year ago to 70.7 percent in the first quarter of 2010 — a sign, Gartner noted, that new players are in the game, especially in Asia, and are starting to make progress.
Among mobile phone makers, Nokia (NYSE:NOK) is still the leader in worldwide market share, claiming 35 percent by Gartner’s estimates. Samsung is second, at 20.6 percent, followed by LG (8.6 percent), RIM (3.4 percent) and Sony Ericsson (3.1 percent). Motorola, Apple, ZTE, G-Five and Huawei round out the top 10. Nokia, LG and Sony Ericsson all lost share percentage points from last year, while Samsung gained 1.5 percent, RIM gained 0.7 percent and Apple gained 1.2 percent. The biggest share percentage gainer was G-Five, which cracked the top 10 for the first time, Gartner noted.
Among smartphone operating systems, Nokia’s Symbian is tops at a 44.3 percent market share of smartphones sold, although that’s down from its 48.8 percent market share in the first quarter of 2009. RIM’s OS market share is also down, to 19.4 percent in this year’s Q1 from last year’s 20.6 percent. Apple (NSDQ:AAPL), at the number three spot with the iPhone OS, has a 15.4 percent market share, up from 10.5 percent last year. And Android — the biggest gainer on the list — holds the number four spot with a 9.6 percent share, up from 1.6 percent a year ago.
Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) Windows Mobile, which declined to 6.8 percent share from 10.2 percent last year, is the number five spot, and Linux and a collective category for “other OSes” round out the list.
America’s Funniest Home Videos may have pioneered the YouTube concept, but as the site reaches the five-year mark, its audience size is no laughing matter. YouTube’s viewership now exceeds that of all three networks combined during their “primetime” evening time slot, with more than 2 billion views per day, Google announced Sunday.
Granted, YouTube’s numbers come from worldwide views, while ABC, CBS and NBC broadcast their primetime channels within the United States. But this is a significant milestone nonetheless, and hints at an eventual tipping point when the internet could become the world’s dominant video-delivery system, Mark Cuban’s predictions aside.
Google also trumpeted some other key stats: People upload over a day’s worth of video to YouTube every minute; the average user spends only 15 minutes a day on the site, which YouTube would like to increase in part by renting full-length films; and YouTube has broadcast live sports to more than 200 countries.
To celebrate its fifth birthday, YouTube asks the site’s users to upload videos of how the site has affected their lives, some of which will appear on a specially curated channel. In addition, celebrities including Conan O’Brien — whose best next career move might be to become official curator of YouTube — marked the occasion by posting a playlist consisting of their favorite videos (view his above).
Should the networks really be worried about being overtaken by YouTube? Yes and no. They own their content, YouTube has professed a wish to lengthen viewing times. Licensing currently-airing full-length network television shows (in addition to the older shows they currently license) would be a great way to do that. And the networks are in a more favorable negotiating position than the record labels were when they made similar deals, due to Hulu (ABC and NBC) and CBS.com already attracting large audiences for that content.
Perhaps a more serious threat to the networks is that YouTube is changing our viewing behavior, and that our viewing habits on the computer will soon migrate to the living room.
Plenty of set-top boxes already play high-definition and even 3-D YouTube videos on a television set. When Google unveils its next-generation set-top box, possibly as soon as Wednesday’s I/O Conference, in partnership with DishNetwork, Intel and/or Sony, YouTube will assume an even greater presence on the television. Even if the networks continue to hold back their full episodes of new shows from on YouTube, users could come to prefer a higher percentage of direct-to-internet content on their televisions.
As paidContent founder and editor Rafat Ali tweeted Monday morning, Conan O’Brien seems “a lot funnier on the internets” than he did on network television, and O’Brien recently joked with a roomful of Google employees about a world without television networks. Who knows, five years from now, O’Brien could be hosting his own show on YouTube, rather than fretting about his terminated NBC contract.
“I don’t know what television’s going to be five years from now. There’s a lot of people that think you’re just going to experience it all through your server, and people don’t even know how the business is going to change,” said O’Brien, who should know, as a longtime television host and writer-producer of the Simpsons.
“There might not be really network television as we know it — wouldn’t that be sweet.”
Of course the app will feature access to Amazon’s massive library of e-books. But unlike the iPhone
and iPad versions, which close the app when you purchase a book (Apple does have to give some advantage to its own iBookstore, apparently), the Android version will allow you to buy books directly from the app.
Android owners will need OS 1.6 or higher and an SD card to use the app. It will work on a number of handsets, including the Droid Incredible, Google Nexus One, HTC MyTouch, Motorola CLIQ, and Motorola Droid. The Android Kindle app features access to more than 500,000 titles.
Over the weekend, Germany’s consumer protection minister rebuked Google for collecting snippets of user data off of Wi-Fi networks around the world since 2006.
The activity, which Google admitted to late Friday afternoon, was done as it expanded its Street View mapping application. The company hopes to use the application for location based services. On Friday, Google said in a blog that it had only discovered it was collecting user information off unencrypted Wi-Fi networks after it was asked by the German government to audit its data collection activity as part of its Street View photo archive.
What Google found specifically was that Street View cars passing by homes collected information off residential Wi-Fi networks that went beyond user names and addresses. Google apologized for the error, which it said was inadvertent and part of an engineering error.
But that didn’t sit well with German regulators, who said the activity broke local laws.
“According to the information available to us so far, Google has for years penetrated private networks, apparently illegally,” Germany’s minister of consumer protection Ilse Aigner said in a statement Saturday, according to the Associated Press. She called the admission an “alarming incident.”
A Google spokesperson said the company was still talking with European regulators and had nothing additional to say beyond the blog post on Friday. Google said it would dispose of the data it had collected. U.S. regulators haven’t weighed in, but the activity comes as the federal government moves closer to create a law and regulatory framework to protect Internet users as businesses seek more refined data on users to sell advertising.
Google has admitted that its Street View cars have been wrongly gathering information from people’s wi-fi activity for three years.
Head of communications at Google, Peter Barron, has told the BBC that this was a ‘mistake’ and more robust proceedures will be put in place.
He also confirmed that Street View cars, which were collecting the wi-fi data, will not be doing so in the future.
Harry McCracken
If this upcoming Android-based tablet is going to compete with the iPad, here are a few features it really needs.
Google and Verizon Wireless are working on an tablet together. That bit of scuttlebutt comes from a pretty well-connected source: Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam, who spilled the beans to the Wall Street Journal today. The device will run the Android OS, and that’s about all we know about it so far-but Verizon says it’ll have more details later this week. (And maybe Google will have something to say at its I|O conference next week.)
This gizmo will, of course, compete with Apple’s iPad. It joins the land rush of would-be iPad killers that don’t actually exist yet (and, in some cases, may never exist). I’d like to see something emerge as the iPad’s most formidable archival-and here are a few features that would help Google and Verizon’s tablet get there.
A decent interface. For all the snarking about the iPad being nothing more than a giant iPod Touch, Apple gave it something no previous tablet has had: a user interface that makes sense, with excellent features like the hybrid menu/window/dialog boxes known as Popovers. Google should rethink Android at least as much before it puts it on an iPad-like device.
Apps! Google’s Chrome OS netbook platform-which feels like a relic of an earlier era even though the first products based on it aren’t supposed to show up until later this year-is based around the philosophy that the only app a computer needs is the World Wide Web. The Google/Verizon tablet isn’t going to go that direction. And I’m curious to see what the companies do to answer the already-thriving iPad app economy. (Will the tablet run apps designed for Android phones?)
Googleishness! One of the best things about Android phones are their nifty integration with Google services such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Picasa, and Google Voice. I’d like to see the tablet go even further-starting with full-blown support for Google Apps, complete with editing.
Flash! Actually, until Adobe releases a FlashPlayer for mobile devices that works, it’s unclear whether it would give the Google/Verizon tablet an edge of any sort over the iPad. Given the recent coziness between Google and Adobe, I expect that Flash will land on this tablet, though-and I’d like to see it, if only as a reality check on whether the iPad’s lack of Flash is an upside or a downside.
Entertainment. On phones, Android’s entertainment infrastructure is pretty spartan-you get access to the Amazon.com music store, YouTube, audio and video players, and not much else. The tablet doesn’t need to replicate the iTunes ecosystem, but it does need more than that. Howsabout a Hulu app, for instance?
Books, magazines, and newspapers. Google is launching an e-book store this summer. Happy coincidence! I’d also like to see Amazon and Barnes & Noble build apps. As well as TIME, USA Today, the New York Times, and other media heavyweights who have released interesting iPad incarnations of their publications.
A bit less heft. At 1.5 pounds, my iPad is on the heavy side to hold like a book for extended periods-and the 3G version is a tenth of an ounce heavier. It weighs as much as it does in part because it has a sizable battery that provides truly excellent battery life. But I’m looking forward to future tablets that aren’t so heavyset.
Cheap data. AT&T has set the bar high with its $30, contract-free unlimited 3G for the iPad. Maybe Verizon can match that-but also offer some sort of price break for those of us who already pay it a monthly fee for wireless data on a phone, a laptop, or both.
A camera. Pretty obvious, right?
An attractive price. Let’s say $399, contract-free, or $199 with some sort of commitment.
INTERNET SEARCH LEADER Google has blogged about the changes to its search pages, explaining that the alterations reflect ‘rising expectations’ for search on the world wide web.
Google has tweaked its results pages, making what amounts to not much more than some design alterations. However, according to a blog post from the firm, there is much more to it than that.
“As the web has evolved over the past decade, people have been typing more sophisticated searches and seeking out specialised search tools to match,” said Jon Wiley, senior user experience designer.
“To keep pace with rapid change online, we have teams of engineers working across Google to develop new ways to present and refine search results. Our central challenge with our latest redesign was to figure out how to squeeze all these tools and technologies into a single page.”
The new design, which includes the altered left hand results panel, should make it easier to navigate results, while being less distracting, Wiley added. “Our users want more powerful tools, but they also want the simplicity they’ve come to expect from Google,” he said.
Regardless of all this fluff, most of the changes are cosmetic. The page has been lightened and the Google logo tweaked to fit in with the general design, and you can see the dramatic impact this has had below.
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