Davemichels

With the big-name phone makers unlikely to announce much at this week’s CTIA show in Las Vegas, a bunch of lesser-known brands are hoping they can grab a moment or two in the spotlight.

On the show floor and through various events, parties and meeting rooms, are companies such as Kyocera, Alcatel One Touch and Coolpad.

The CTIA show has traditionally taken a back seat to events like CES and Mobile World Congress, but this year’s show is expected to be particularly short of announcements from the biggest names in wireless.

Smaller names are eager to fill the void. Alcatel One Touch, for example, is trying to position itself as a key player for carriers looking to offer high-end smartphone features at entry-level prices.

“They need choices,” said Steve Cistulli, who left Samsung earlier this year to become senior VP of North America for Alcatel One Touch. “Currently, their top two choices are quite expensive.”

That said, Alcatel now has to battle bigger names as well as negative reviews for its early product work.

Meanwhile, Kyocera took to the frosty Minus5 ice bar at the Mandalay Bay casino and resort to introduce their latest waterproof phones.

There, the company showed off two new phones in the Hydro line, one headed for Sprint and Boost Mobile and the other destined for U.S. Cellular.

Caterpillar, meanwhile, is well known for heavy equipment, but not so much for phones. The company is hoping to change that with a partnership with Bullitt Mobile to make a rugged Android phone with the Cat brand.

And these are but a few of the not-yet-household-names looking to grab a slice of the fast growing — and increasingly competitive — smartphone market.

As for the big-name players, only Verizon Wireless is promising significant news. The company has scheduled a press conference for Wednesday with COO Marni Walden. But don’t expect to hear about some snazzy new device; the focus will be on the company’s efforts to reach new segments of the market.

That said, all the top carriers and hardware vendors are here (except Apple), so we’ll be sniffing around the various parties and gatherings to see if we can’t dig up some interesting stuff. (Tips are also welcome.)

Truphone has always had a soft spot for the international business traveler. When it became a virtual mobile carrier in 2010, its core service was a plan that charged you local rates for voice, SMS and data on either side of the Atlantic – a boon to any globetrotter accustomed to paying exorbitant roaming fees outside his home country. Now Truphone is extending more love to border-crossing businessmen and women – or at least to the companies that pay their phone bills.

On Tuesday Truphone is unveiling its first shared plans for business. Companies can now buy big batches of minutes, texts and megabytes and pool them across not just multiple devices, but also multiple nations. For instance a $500 plan includes 5000 voice minutes, 5000 text messages and 1 GB of 3G data, all of which can be used anywhere in the U.S., U.K. Netherlands, Australia and Hong Kong. Germany, Poland and Spain will join that list later this year.

Those prices will definitely seem high to most of us since we’re accustomed paying only for the for the domestic-only voice and data buckets offered by our local carriers. But if you’re splitting your time between countries in the Truphone “Zone” those rates look like a bargain. Anyone who has ever opened their mobile browser overseas can attest to international data roaming rates being practically criminal — $20 a megabyte isn’t uncommon.

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After a seven-year hiatus, Arrested Development is back — and now, a trailer for the sitcom's fourth season has debuted online.

Posted to YouTube on Sunday, it shows the quirky Bluth family — including Michael (played by Jason Bateman), Lindsay (Portia de Rossi), Gob (Will Arnett), George-Michael (Michael Cera) and other members — reuniting onscreen.

Fox aired the first three seasons of Arrested Development from 2003 to 2006. Although the show gained a cult following, it was eventually canceled due to low ratings and viewership. Following years of fan anticipation for a series revival or feature film, Netflix announced last year that Arrested Development would be making a comeback under its wing. Read more...

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Unless you've been living under a rock lately, you're probably aware that the tide is turning here in the States more and more in favor of rights for the LGBT community. Interestingly, America rests somewhere in the middle on the spectrum on these kinds of issues, with plenty of world nations allowing for more gay rights and certainly many that allow for less. While this one-toe-in-the-water approach is perfectly reflected in entertainment mediums like video games, it's certainly worth noting that games in North America have begun to be more inclusive when it comes to LGBT characters and/or options in so-called "choice" or "sandbox" games. The Sims franchise was somewhere on the forefront of that sort of thing and more recent games like the Mass Effect series finally began to follow suit. And now it appears we can add the notoriously conservative Nintendo to the list of game developers that include such characters in their games.

See, gamers playing Nintendo's Tomodachi Collection: New Life noticed that this latest iteration of the game, which is very much like The Sims, had the option for the first time to have their male characters marry other male characters and raise children together. Hooray for civil rights progress, right guys?

One Twitter user claims to have contacted Nintendo's customer support, which supposedly said this is a bug and that the game needs to be patched. Online in Japan, however, there were many internet users who said they planned on getting this game only after learning of this bug—er, feature.

That Twitter user's story now appears to be confirmed, with Nintendo releasing a patch to fix the "bug", which it says allows for "human relations that become strange." So allowing players to be as gay in their virtual lives as they might be in their real lives wasn't a feature, it was a bug. And you're going to correct it. Here's another idea, and I'm just spitballing here, but how about the fix you release doesn't take away a bit of the humanity of your latest game, but rather extends it to female characters as well? It's not like including gay characters in a game, particularly one that is all about personal choice, means that somehow the game developers all agree in unison that all the morality questions are thrown aside. I happen to think that anyone who finds a problem with homosexuality is on the wrong side of both humanity and biology, but I won't dismiss the right for other people to have a different opinion. The thing is, none of that is the point. I played the Sims. I don't remember any more of an uproar over that game's characters being able to be gay than I remember an outcry over how you used to be able to order a pizza and then build walls around the delivery guy until he died (great fun, btw). Nobody who saw that done suddenly thought EA was supporting delivery boy murder and no one with a lick of sense thought EA was taking some moral stance on gay rights.

And besides all that, the reaction to the bug? Freaking positive.

In Japan, some Tomodachi Collection: New Life owners seem thrilled by the bug, posting photos of their gay couples online. In the images, male Mii characters ask each other to go steady, propose marriage, go on Honeymoons, bathe together, and raise children.

Well, no kidding, because the metrics of the debate are shifting quickly to be more inclusive. Even if one were to think that homosexuality was immoral, you can't lose your stones about it being included in a video game, unless you're also going to take the same stance on murder, violence, theft, cursing, lying, etc. Nintendo made their bones on a stereotyped Italian plumber. Now that Nintendo has decided to erase the option to be gay from this game, I hope to hell the backlash is as brutal as it should be.

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During a fireside chat with four Google Research heavyweights — artificial-intelligence guru Peter Norvig, Google Glass guy Thad Starner, MapReduce paper co-author Jeff Dean and distributed computing wizard Alfred Spector — on Thursday, an audience member sucked up the air in the overcrowded room when he asked “where we’ll be 10 years from now.”

Without a doubt, the panel, at Google I/O, was an apt forum for that question. If any company is innovating in a big way, it’s Google, with recent advancements in voice recognition, wearable technology, quantum computing and other realms. So it wouldn’t be surprising to see some of the Google luminaries’ ideas actually come into being. Here’s what they had to say:

“Speech recognition and vision are showing dramatic improvements over the last few years. We just need to scale them up and make them work better. … They’re (mobile devices) going to vanish into much smaller devices that you carry around and aren’t full-size laptops.” — Jeff Dean

“We’re getting more contextualized. The computer is not what you go to to use. It’s something that’s around you all the time and sort of more integrated into your life, rather than a separate thing.” — Peter Norvig

“I would argue that we’re currently living the singularity, where the tool stops and the mind begins will start becoming blurry.” — Thad Starner

So there you have it, folks — the computer as a smaller and more natural extension of the human brain. Now, let’s set the kitchen timer for 10 years and see what actually happens.

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It may seem like an Android and iOS world, and that's because it is. The two mobile operating systems made up 92% of all smartphone shipments during the first quarter of 2013.

New data from the International Data Corporation (IDC) reveals Apple and Google's mobile platforms far exceed other competitors. Together, they shipped 199.5 million units across the globe during the quarter, up 59% from the same period the previous year.

The report also says Windows Phone has surpassed BlackBerry for the third spot in the market

"Android and iOS accounted for more than the lion's share of smartphones in the first quarter, but a closer examination of the other platforms reveals turnaround and demand for alternatives," said Ramon Llamas, research manager with IDC's Mobile Phone team. "Windows Phone has benefited from Nokia's participation, and BlackBerry's new BB10 devices have already hit a million units shipped in its first quarter of availability." Read more...

More about Mobile, Android, Apple, Ios, and Tech

Think your network is fast? Getting a gigagbyte-sized movie over your local wireless network to your hard drive in a few seconds is old hat. Now there's a network that can push a 2-hour, high-definition movie to a computer a mile away in less time than it takes to read a single word.

At the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, a new record has been set: 40GB per second over a distance of about .6 of a mile. That's like sending 10 high-def feature films

What makes this possible is a combination of better hardware and the use of higher radio frequencies, in this case, 240 gigahertz. That hardware is a set of chips developed at Karlsruhe that can process signals at higher frequencies. Higher frequencies mean smaller components, since a shorter wavelength can be picked up by a smaller antenna (which is why FM and AM radios need relatively large antennas, while Wi-Fi receivers can use small ones). These chips were only a few millimeters on a side. Read more...

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Google's alternative to Microsoft Office, Google Apps, has always suffered from the fact that it offers a sort of "good enough" compatibility — fine for most basic document and spreadsheet tasks, but not enough to match certain Office features.

Now Google is preparing to use technology from a recent acquisition, QuickOffice, to close that gap.

In recent weeks, Google sources have told me that Google has been internally testing, or "dogfooding," QuickOffice, which began life as a standalone productivity app that offers better compatibility with Office than Google's own Apps. Now, however, Google is testing QuickOffice as a cloud-based service in its own Chrome browser.

(Google already provides QuickOffice as part of its Google Apps subscription, specifically as an app for customers with Android tablets or iPads.)

Why QuickOffice?

QuickOffice uses the same .DOCX file format that Office does, allowing users to quickly edit and share the same files as Office users. QuickOffice compatibility probably means that more businesses and users will see Google Apps as a viable alternative to Office, wounding Microsoft's Office cash cow. 

Google sources also say they're confident that Microsoft won't be able to block QuickOffice with licensing issues or other legal threats. Eventually, these individuals say, QuickOffice will become the foundation of Google Apps, although that's still a ways off.

The target, Google sources said, isn't the full PC-based version of Office itself - although that might be a bit of spin. Instead, Google claims to think of QuickOffice as a competitor to Microsoft's own Web-based versions of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel - which often deliberately fall short of full Office functionality. For now, that means running QuickOffice as a browser app, probably using Google's Native Client technology, until Google's engineers can integrate it directly with Apps.

It's another example of the growing tension between Microsoft and Google, evidenced by the Microsoft's "rule-breaking" YouTube Windows Phone app and its use of an open API to talk to Google+ users via its Outlook.com Web site.

Google chief executive Larry Page, for example, used his Google I/O keynote to call out Microsoft's behavior as "really sad," and said that Microsoft took advantage of the open API. "Being negative is not how we make progress," Page said. "And most important things are not zero-sum. There's a lot of opportunity out there."

Google Tipped QuickOffice Plans At Pixel Launch

Google acquired QuickOffice last year for an undisclosed sum, and the team went quiet. But we know that Google plans to add QuickOffice to the Pixel, because Google said so.

At the launch of the Pixel a few months ago, Google's Chrome chief, Sundar Pichai, said that it would take two to three months to add QuickOffice to the Pixel, but that it would be included with it. Since it wasn't available when Google handed out thousands of Pixels to developers Wednesday, it must be coming soon.

Looking back, Pichai actually spoke quite a bit about QuickOffice's role within Google at the Pixel launch- but the media (probably correctly) focused on the Pixel hardware itself. Pichai set the stage for the Pixel handout by emphasizing, again and again, that the Pixel represented the best Chromebook experience for developers and early adopters: "if you're living in the cloud, this is the best experience you can use," Pichai said then.

Microsoft Strikes... Too Soon

Microsoft clearly anticipated a QuickOffice launch at Google I/O. On May 10, it published a blog post that directly attacked the compatibility of Google Apps as well as QuickOffice. Jake Zborowski, a senior product manager at Microsoft, wrote:

Productivity software is built to help people communicate. It's more than just the words in a document or presentation; it's about the tone, style and format you use to convey an overall message. People often entrust important information in these documents -- from board presentations to financial analyses to book reports. You should be able to trust that what you intend to communicate is what is being seen.

Zborowski's post included several sample documents that users could download themselves for comparison's sake, as well as a funny YouTube video that included Rob Schenider and Pete Rose, poking fun at the "gamble" that is Google Apps. In a supporting comment, Zborowski pointed out that Google doesn't support the Open Document Format, suggesting that Microsoft is more open than Google.

Google representatives shrugged off the post, noting that the example documents relied on Office functions typical users rarely touch, such as watermarks and odd text spacing. 

However, Microsoft's post also noted that Office Web Apps can now be used within Android, leaving the Microsoft-Google competition within the Android tablet space as an app - Google's QuickOffice - versus a cloud solution, Microsoft's Office Web apps.

The whole point of the Pixel, according to Pichai, is to show off the power of the cloud. Microsoft, for its part, is still largely wedded to the desktop application, and the $23 billion or so that its Business Division pulls in on an annual basis. (Office 365 doesn't live in the cloud, although it has cloud hooks in SkyDrive and its subscription delivery system.) That's a target that Google has attacked for several years now, with dueling customer announcements from both sides marking the ebb and flow of the battle.

Micosoft may be right that Google Apps and QuickOffice don't offer the full capabilities of Office. But they come close - and "close" has been the selling point behind Apps all along. QuickOffice looks like it could close the gap.

Image Source: Google

There's no end in sight to the Google-Apple duopoly in the smartphone market, but Microsoft's Windows Phone software has taken third place, overtaking BlackBerry, thanks to Nokia's help.

In the race for third mobile platform, there’s a new favorite: Windows Phone.

According to new research from IDC, Microsoft’s mobile operating system accounted for 3.2 percent of global smartphone shipments in the first quarter. That’s a significant gain from the OS’s performance in the first quarter of 2012, which saw it capture a market share of 2 percent. And it was enough for Windows Phone to unseat BlackBerry from its third-place spot and claim the rank for its own.

Admittedly, ousting BlackBerry wasn’t exactly a difficult task. In the first quarter, the struggling handset maker saw its share of global smartphone shipments halved year over year. In Q1 of 2012, it claimed a 6.4 percent share. This year, BlackBerry managed to snag only 2.9 percent.

An unfortunate loss of momentum for BlackBerry, though one that’s not entirely attributable to the ascension of other platforms and a lack of interest in its own. BlackBerry is in the midst of a transition to an entirely new OS, BlackBerry 10. Right now, the company has just two smartphones that use it. The bulk of its handset portfolio continues to run on its older OS. And according to IDC analyst Kevin Restivo, that’s almost certainly having an effect on sales.

“Windows Phone is clearly gaining momentum,” Restivo told AllThingsD. “But BlackBerry’s decline this quarter really has more to do with the lag between sales of its old handsets and its new ones than anything else. Sure, Windows Phone is ahead now, but there’s no guarantee that it will maintain its third-place ranking in upcoming quarters.”

And, as I’ve noted before, third place in the current smartphone OS rankings doesn’t mean much. According to IDC, Google and Apple captured 92.3 percent of all smartphone shipments with their Android/iOS duopoly (Android: 59.1 percent; iOS: 23 percent). In other words, Windows Phone and BlackBerry are so far behind the two leading mobile platforms that their ranking is really just a moot point, anyway.

“We are only at 1% of what is possible.” ~ Google CEO Larry Page

Page is right. Even though it seems like we get a breakthrough new technology every year, we are really just scratching the surface. But what does that really mean? If we have achieved only 1% of what is technologically possible, Google is setting itself up to be the company that fills in the other 99%.

Just look at the Google I/O keynote Wednesday morning in San Francisco. The company had so many aspects of its product portfolio to announce that it took three hours to work through it all. And that was before Page hit the stage and turned all philosophical:

I think we're all here because we share a deep sense of optimisim about the potential for technology to improve people's lives and the world.

Google Owns The Second Half Of The Chess Board

At a conference in Boston last week Andrew McAfee, a Principal Research Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, related a story about the pace of innovation that directly speaks to Page’s notion. McAfee recounted how the inventor of chess introduced the game to the emperor of India. The emperor was so impressed with the game's combination of simplicity and complexity, depth and vision, that he told the inventor he could have any gift he could imagine. 

The inventor asked for a grain of rice, doubled for each square on the chess board. On the first square he would get a single grain of rice, on the second square he would get two, on the third he would get four grains, and so on. The request seemed fairly humble to the emperor and he granted it.

What the emperor did not realize, of course, is that if you keep doubling a number, it doesn't take long for for the figures to get really, really big. If the emperor had delivered all the rice he agreed to, the pile would have been bigger than Mount Everest. 

McAfee linked this story to Moore’s Law (which holds that number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years) and the explosion of data created by humans, rapidly approaching the mind-numbingly large “yotta” byte. Between Big Data and Moore’s Law, McAfee said, we have entered the second half of the chessboard of innovation.

Google's Mountain Of Rice

In this case, though, Google is both the inventor and the emperor. Just like chess, Google’s portfolio of products is deceptively simple but utterly complex. And the company is well positioned to turn that portfolio into a truly epic mountain of rice. 

Rice, in this case, could mean data. Or money. Or better yet, innovation.

Who is going to challenge Google’s core products? Yahoo and Microsoft can't come close to what Google has done with the knowledge graph and voice search. Android is forging ahead of iOS around the world. Chrome is one of the simplest but most sophisticated browsers on the planet. And the company's search ad products just keep cranking out the profits that pay for the company's push in to new areas.

Larry Page Doesn't Think Competition Is Interesting

Yet the individual products seem almost incidental to Page's quest for innovation. Towards the end of the keynote, he harped on the technology industry for holding back the pace of innovation with lawsuits, data hoarding and stifling cross-platform integration:

You know we haven't seen this rate of change in computing for a long time. Probably not since the birth of personal computing... [but] despite the faster change in the industry, we're still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have.

If Page had his way, Google would not be playing chess against it competitors, but working with them to create even more rice:

You know every story I read about Google is sort of us vs. some other company, or some stupid thing, and I just don't find that very interesting. We should be building great things that don't exist. Most important things are not zero-sum. There's a lot of opportunity out there. We can use technology to make really new and really important things to make people's lives better. 

Business, of course, doesn’t typically work that way. Google has to exist within a whirlwind of quarterly earnings statements and antitrust lawsuits, litigation and corporate development. Given all that, it's amazing that Google is able to do all that it does, pushing the boundaries of technology every year. If Page is right, and we are truly just at 1% of what technology is capable of, someone has to lead the way into the remaining 99%. And despite Page's protestations, no one is better positioned than Google to do just that. 

Images by Nick Statt for ReadWrite.

Imagine this: A big conference where a closely watched tech company launched barely anything new or unexpected.

And, after confining the audience to their seats for three hours of a hodgepodge of announcements, the CEO of the company came out and bemoaned the industry horse-race mentality (which could be read as hypocritical for many reasons).

Still, the company’s stock spiked up and beyond an all-time high, and everybody raved about how great it all was.

It doesn’t make any sense, of course, unless perhaps you were talking about one of the patented reality distortion field performances of the late Steve Jobs of Apple.

But somehow that’s how it worked for Google this past week at its 2013 I/O developers conference, where nothing big or particularly ambitious was unveiled. Unlike previous editions of the conference that had major reveals, every announcement on Wednesday — dozens and dozens of them — got roughly equal billing and were presented in much the same manner. An exec set up the larger initiative, a product manager did a demo, followed by a feel-good video that showed its potential.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

While there were better tools for app developers, a neat-looking new design for Google Maps, features to automatically sort and edit photos, a way to search by voice from your computer the same way you already can from your phone, a personalized music service, a program to distribute educational tablet apps to students, a different set of software for an existing Samsung smartphone and four more languages for Google’s Knowledge Graph, it was still largely incremental.

Why there was no new rev of Android, just when Apple’s Jonny Ive is busy with a radical overhaul of iOS? Where were the new Nexus devices as the smartphone market gets more competitive than ever? What happened to the promise of Android @home and Google TV? If Apple had done this kind of incremental WWDC, they’d be slammed.

Instead, Google I/O got away without launching any significant revisions — not even a .1 release! — or devices for either its Android or Chrome platforms. It didn’t even spend keynote time on its hot topic “moonshot” projects.

Come to think of it, Google CEO Larry Page’s closing speech about the amazing potential of technology to change people’s lives might have been more fitting at the end of three hours about Google Glass and the self-driving cars. Like last year, when his co-founder Sergey Brin organized his Glass skydiving stunt from an overhead blimp down to the stage, streamed via Google Hangout.

But Wednesday wasn’t about the dream-big stuff of tomorrow, it was about today being a better version of yesterday.

In many ways, Google was filling in a structure it had already built. The company brought many products from one device or platform to another. It applied its artificial intelligence smarts for everything from beautifying photos of faces to anticipating potential searches in context. It added analytics to do useful things like help Android app developers see how effective their Google advertising spending is on driving installs. It personalized, personalized and then personalized.

That’s not to say the many products Google introduced at I/O were not impressive when taken as a whole. Rather, the incremental improvements taken together are building out its massive vision. Maybe we’re getting cynical because today’s reality is too close to science fiction to remember when it seemed crazy. Or maybe Google just hypnotized us all.

Even some Googlers conceded this. In a conversation with Johanna Wright, an eight-year veteran of Google who is now VP of search and assist for Android, she made a similar observation about the keynote.

“Having been at Google so long, I feel like there might be no single leap, no single announcement, but the way it’s coming together feels like a huge leap,” Wright said. “There’s a deep understanding underlying it.”

That Google could pull this off so successfully is interesting, especially when you think about one of its main competitors like Apple, where the news cycle is all about secrets and supplier signals and hope and fickle investors and disappointment and scrutiny.

That’s perhaps because Google is not as caught up in that launch-dependent hardware wowing, but rather has picked a line of products that it commits to and continually improves upon and is then held to a different standard.

That’s one explanation, at least.

Whatever the reason, it worked. In after-hours trading, Google stock was at $918.70 after the big show. In its entire history, it had never crossed $900 before that morning.

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For the last few months, Microsoft has been running a pointed PR and ad campaign against Google, where it accuses the search giant of screwing over its customers.

You gotta hand it to Microsoft: Yesterday they got Google to help promote their message for them.

On Wednesday afternoon, shortly after Google had finished a marathon presentation at its I/O developer conference,  reports surfaced that Google’s YouTube had sent Microsoft a cease and desist letter, demanding that Redmond shut down a YouTube app it had built for its Windows Phone.

The issue, in a nutshell, is that the Microsoft app, built on YouTube’s public data feed, violates the video site’s terms of service, primarily because it strips out ads YouTube inserts alongside its videos. Windows Phone users can still watch YouTube videos, via their Web browser, but the experience isn’t as slick as a dedicated app.

So: Bad for Windows Phone users! But while it’s tempting to turn this into a he said/he said, there’s little to hash out, fact-wise.

There’s no dispute that Microsoft’s Windows app violates Google’s terms. And Microsoft, which has been complaining about access to YouTube for years, had to know exactly what it was doing. It also knows how to play nicely with YouTube, as it did with an Xbox app the two companies built together and launched last year.

The only question is why Microsoft went ahead and built the app, anyway. Here we have to do some guessing, as both YouTube and Microsoft executives declined to comment.

So, ok. I’ll guess: Microsoft launched the YouTube app last week precisely because it hoped YouTube would make a fuss.

I’m also guessing that Microsoft is very happy that The Verge and Wired were able to “obtain” copies of the C&D letter.

I’ll keep guessing: I think Microsoft is ecstatic about the fact that Google sent the letter yesterday, on the same day it wanted all eyes on its new products and services.

And the fact that Larry Page closed the Google event by insisting that he’s got nothing but love for everyone, everywhere — even if they’re building rival technologies?

My guess is they have to be over the moon about that.

IBM is shutting the doors on Lotus 1-2-3, the software program that made the IBM PC and Microsoft household names.

In yet another groundbreaking online education deal (between Udacity and Coursera, there are at least two per week!), Udacity will now offer masters degrees in computer science via a partnership between Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing and AT&T. These MOOC degrees will cost less than $7,000 per year and be labeled separately as an “Online Master of Science” degree.

This year’s Google I/O developer conference is shaping up to be a very different show from last year’s spectacle.

The company has downplayed expectations ahead of the event, saying that it will shift the focus back on developers and services rather than new hardware products and a new operating system.

We’ll find out exactly what’s in store tomorrow, when Google I/O 2013 officially kicks off with a three-hour keynote. But, before that, we thought this would be a good time to take a look back at what has happened since the last I/O.

At times resembling an action flick more than a developer conference, Google I/O 2012 was most memorable for the outrageous Google Glass demonstration and hardware announcements. But with all that hype comes some disappointment.

Google Glass

Skydivers, rooftop bikers and rappellers — that’s how Google first introduced Google Glass to the world. This wearable computer allows users to take pictures and video, get directions and search the Internet by voice. At the time of the conference, U.S.-based attendees could preorder an early version of the futuristic glasses for only (!) $1,500.

Google has since been holding developer events, and the glasses have been making the rounds at high-profile showcases and with some tech bloggers. In an interview with NPR last weekend, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said the company has shipped about 2,000 units to developers. However, there is still no release date for the device. If you just can’t wait, you can always make your own.

Nexus Q

Looking to take on Apple, Microsoft and Amazon in the battle for the living room, Google introduced its media-streaming device, the Nexus Q, at I/O last year. The bocce-ball-sized unit allows users to wirelessly stream Google Play content to a TV or home theater system, and there was much praise when Google announced that it would be manufactured in the U.S. But Nexus Q — or at least this first attempt — turned out to be a nothingburger.

A mere month after its debut, Google postponed the Nexus Q indefinitely after getting initial feedback from users saying they wanted the device to do more. The company said it would work on making the product better, but we have yet to see any updates. And we won’t be hearing about it at this year’s conference.

Nexus 7

Google’s Nexus 7 tablet fared much better. Launched in mid-July, the Asus-built tablet stood out in a sea of Android tablets with its affordable $200 price tag, without skimping out on features or quality. AllThingsD’s Walt Mossberg called it a winner in his review, and said it was the toughest challenger to the iPad yet.

It’s difficult to know just how well it did, since Google does not release sales figures. But at one point Asus said sales were approaching one million units a month. The Nexus 7 is due for a refresh, but we may not see it till later this summer.

Android Jelly Bean

More of an incremental upgrade than a major overhaul, Android Jelly Bean 4.1 brought such enhancements as improved text and speech input, the ability to share photos between phones via NFC and more detailed notifications. Jelly Bean also introduced Google Now, a smart personal assistant app that provides information based on your location, search queries and other personal data. Just last month, a version of Google Now was released for the iPhone and iPad.

As of May 1, around 28.4 percent of Android devices were running Jelly Bean, which is slightly more than those running the previous version, Ice Cream Sandwich (27.5 percent). Still, a plurality (38.5 percent) of Android phones are running Gingerbread, which is two versions behind Jelly Bean. At I/O 2011, Google announced the Android Upgrade Alliance to help improve the rate of updates, and while things have gotten better, these numbers show that there is still a lot of work to be done.

Google Compute Engine

Looking to take on Amazon in another battleground, Google announced its Compute Engine cloud-computing service at the conference last year. In an effort to get more businesses to run their applications on servers in Google’s data center, the company said its new service offers 50 percent more computing power per dollar than its rivals. Google Compute Engine was released in limited preview at the time of I/O, but last month Google opened up the service to anyone who signs up for its Gold support program, which starts at $400 per month.

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Bill Gates was the subject of last night's 60 Minutes and he and host Charlie Rose touched on a wide array of topics, primarily the billionaire's humanitarian efforts under the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 

While the focus may have been on life after Microsoft, the interview also included emotional recollections from Gates as he recalled the last time he saw longtime rival Steve Jobs alive in May of 2011. He recalls Jobs being very forward-looking, focusing both on heavy subjects like where technology had failed education as well as personal ones, like finishing his 260-foot yacht Venus despite the somber realization from both he and Gates that it was unlikely he would ever set foot on the finished vessel. 

When asked, as he often is, what he think Jobs was better at, Gates immediately responds, "His sense of design, that everything had to fit an aesthetic...it shows that design can lead you in a good direction and phenomenal products came out it."

Watch the unaired footage from the interview below: 

The Onion, the satirical news site that saw its Twitter account hijacked by a Syrian hacker group earlier this week, has just performed a pretty significant bit of public service.

In a detailed post, the site’s tech team has published a fairly thorough tick-tock on how the attack was carried out.

This is the opposite of what companies usually do when they experience a security breach. The pro-Assad Syrian Electronic Army has been attacking the Twitter accounts of many Western media organizations in recent weeks, including CBS News, the BBC, Associated Press, and others). None of those organizations have followed up with any significant disclosure about what happened.

When companies and organizations suffer a computer breach of any kind, the impulse is to keep the details of how it was carried out close to the vest. There are many legitimate reasons for this, not the least of which is that it’s embarrassing. And the details can shed light on internal processes and procedures that might be of value to competitors.

In addition, there’s a public relations consideration. Stories about hacking attacks are negative. If there’s any media coverage, there’s an understandable desire for the coverage to stop. Disclosures about how it happened yield another round of coverage that would otherwise be unwanted. In cases like this, the desire for no coverage wins out.

As one media organization after another has fallen for the Syrian Electronic Army’s tricks, there seemed to be a common thread that ran through the circumstances of each incident. All appear to have fallen prey to some kind of “phishing” attack. These are spoofed emails that look legitimate but which contain attachments or links that are used to gather information like usernames and passwords to carry out the attack.

What The Onion has disclosed is that the attackers in this case used a sophisticated multilayered attack, using information gleaned in the first round to then launch a second that gathers more information, and so on, until at last they had penetrated the target: The Onion’s Twitter account, with a healthy five million followers.

This is by far the most detailed account of any of these attacks that I’ve read. And the more people who read it the better, because eventually the methods used will stop working.

I’ve long thought that there ought to be more transparency from private companies in these matters, especially from media organizations that have a certain amount of accountability to the public that they serve. When hackers thought to be based in China attacked several media organizations, including The Wall Street Journal (which, like this website, is owned by News Corp.) and the New York Times, the apparent intent was to monitor communications about reporting what those organizations were doing about Chinese officials and companies.

In the case of the Syrian Electronic Army, the intent was to take advantage of the Twitter followers these organizations have attracted and hijack their accounts to spread political propaganda. The attacks do some short-term damage to reputations and result in some embarrassing press coverage for a day or so. Usually, no one ever learns anything useful, because the details remain obscured. Yesterday, The Onion changed that. It’s an example we can all learn from.

While Huawei may be de facto barred from selling U.S. telecoms and technology firms its networking gear, the Chinese company is ramping up its efforts to bring its smartphones to the lucrative market.

Sony's forecasts are holding true as the firm records its first profit in five years.

Cisco's latest global trends report examines just how much IT pros are in touch with industry trends, such as software-defined networking and the Internet of Things.

It's long been assumed (or hinted at very strongly by a variety of evidence) that the feds have been making and collecting copies of pretty much every digital communication available. A whistleblower from AT&T more or less revealed the details on that. The NSA's ability to collect all this data is well documented, and people are just now coming to terms with the legal loopholes used to justify this mass sweeping up of communications.

However, for the most part, it was believed that the content of phone calls was not included in this broad sweep. While it's well known that law enforcement can get a wiretap on your phone if they suspect something, there was little indication that other calls are being recorded. Similarly, information about who you called and when you spoke to them tend to be easy for law enforcement to get. However, Glenn Greenwald is noting that a former FBI counterterrorism agent, Tim Clemente, went on TV, and in discussing the investigation of Katherine Russell (the wife of deceased accused Boston bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev) has clearly said that the contents of historical phone calls are also available to the feds.

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It's not a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There's no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: "No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

BURNETT: "So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

CLEMENTE: "No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not."

It's possible this was an exaggeration, but when questioned about this particular point later, Clemente again insisted that it was the case and specifically added that "all digital communications in the past" are recorded and stored. Of course, again, he may have misspoke. Or he may be exaggerating for effect. There's also the possibility that Tamerlan's phone calls were actually being tapped given the earlier investigation of him for possible terrorist connections.

So there are numerous possibilities here, but it is still a case of an FBI counterterrorism agent claiming, multiple times, that the contents of all phone calls are being recorded which, if true, would be quite a revelation (and probably not something Clemente is supposed to be revealing via an interview with the media). At the very least, it would be good for there to be some serious follow up on this to find out how true Clemente's claims really are.

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GEICO, the diversified insurance company owned by Berkshire Hathaway, has teamed with Nuance Communications to offer its own mobile, personal virtual assistant (PVA) branded as Lily. The company  hasn’t made the sort of marketing splash that it made when it introduced its mobile app with a media blitz starring Maxwell the Pig yelling “wee wee wee” in the backseat of a family station wagon, but that is because management feels like it doesn’t have to; if they do it well, mobile customers will naturally use it.

In a press release issued when the app was updated in the Apple App Store, GEICO cited the fact that, even prior to the formal introduction of a conversational element to the service, 40% (“two out of five”) of the people with the app “use voice technology on their mobile devices today.”

GEICO’s experience is not an aberration. A survey conducted by OnlineDegress.com about a year ago showed that nearly 9 out of ten iPhone 4s owners used Siri at least once a month. More than one out of four used it daily to check email. Only 35% said that they would never use Siri. In short, they were on a mission of discovery and, for something like 40% of users had found the Siri-enabled functions that they were ready to use regularly. More importantly, more than half of the respondents said that having a Siri-like feature would be “critical” in terms of choosing their next smartphone.

Speech Skeptics are bound to express doubts about wanting to talk to a machine while seeking roadside assistance. Their hesitation is based on bad past experience with earlier speech recognition systems, perhaps in noisy environments. Critics also tend to treat “virtual assistants” as the ugly stepchildren of speech enabled “personae” – meaning machines programmed to have a certain “attitude” that many users found grating or annoying.

Indeed, the claim from Pete Meoli, GEICO’s director of mobile and digital design, that Lily would have “a lively personality to allow our mobile customers to connect with her at a deeper level” will give some prospective users a cause for pause. But that’s not the point. Lily – as the natural interface to the GEICO mobile app – will have the ability to support interactions at a “deeper level.” She’ll be location aware, she’ll have account history at her fingertips and, on top of all that, she’ll benefit form fairly accurate speech recognition and a corpus of candidates for “next best action” distilled from voluminous amounts of GEICO’s historical interactions.

As often as I’ve called my automobile insurance provider and spent the obligatory 5 minutes making selections from a series of voice menus, or sitting on hold waiting to talk to the one person who specializes in my particularly problem, I know that interacting with an cool, calm, collected automated assistant would be a welcome, positive change. It just takes some getting used to.

 

Citrix is merging its Branch Repeater, which delivers PC applications to virtual desktops with CloudBridge, which connects to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and data centers.

San Jose State University, one of the biggest academic supporters of the growing MOOC (massive open online course) movement, apparently has some vocal dissenters in its ranks.

In the past year, the university has welcomed MOOC providers like edX and Udacity with open arms — in addition to launching a first-of-its kind program with Udacity to award college credit for courses taken on its platform. The school has a growing partnership with edX and plans to create a dedicated resource center for California State University faculty statewide who are interested in online content.

But discord seems to brewing among some faculty.  This week, professors in the Philosophy department said they refuse to teach an edX course on “justice” developed by a Harvard University professor, arguing that MOOCs come at “great peril” to their university.

In an open letter (first published by the Chronicle of Higher Education) to the Harvard professor behind the course, the San Jose State faculty members argued that while they believe that technology can be used to improve education (by enabling instructors to record lectures so students can replay them, for example), they believe MOOCs could “replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.”

Will MOOCs lead to two classes of universities?

Not only do they worry about a future in which fewer perspectives are offered by universities (“the thought of the exact same social justice course being taught in various philosophy departments across the country is downright scary — something out of a dystopian novel,” they say), the professors argue that the MOOC model will lead to two classes of universities.

“One, well-funded colleges and universities in which privileged students get their own real professor; the other, financially stressed private and public universities in which students watch a bunch of video-taped lectures and interact, if indeed any interaction is available on their home campuses, with a professor that this model of education has turned into a glorified teaching assistant,” the letter says.

In the past year, MOOCs have picked up considerable momentum – Coursera, for example, says more than 3 million students have enrolled in a course and 62 top universities from around the world have signed on as partners. And they’re starting to show their effectiveness in blended learning classrooms. In a pilot program at San Jose State, a professor leading an introductory course on electrical engineering incorporated content from the edX course “Circuits and Electronics,” assigning students videos and problem sets to review outside of class. According to edX and San Jose State, the pass rate in that blended class was much higher than the pass rates in conventional classes.

More faculty members show resistance

But as MOOC providers carve out a bigger presence for themselves in higher education, university faculty members are beginning to raise compelling concerns. Last month, faculty at Amherst College voted to reject a partnership with edX, citing similar concerns about the long-term impacts of MOOCs on the U.S. university system. Namely, they argued that they would perpetuate an “information dispensing” model of teaching and lead to a centralized system of higher education that weakens middle- and lower-tier schools.

The San Jose example shows that just because university administrators are willing to embrace the MOOC format, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t deep resistance from their faculty. And, given that some believe that the MOOCs’ honeymoon period is winding down, it wouldn’t be surprising to see more examples like this emerge.

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I recently published the Googrilla in the Midst which posits that the influence and impact of Google Apps is largely underappreciated and untapped by the UC community. We are reasonably confident that the cloud in general, and Google Apps specifically, will continue to grow. We also are sure that UC and VoIP have a bright future and hosted UC will continue to grow rapidly.

A few additional thoughts:

Is Google Apps real or an experiment?

Google has a short attention span and is known to kill-off products without much warning. It’s one of the big risks of betting on a cloud services in general (see the Cloud Dissipation Problem).  However, I don’t think there’s much risk of Google Apps disappearing anytime soon. Here’s just a quick list of reasons why.

1. Google Apps has momentum
2. Google Apps has unique differentiators (multi-user collaboration)
3. Google Apps has been monetized
4. Google Apps competes (effectively) with Microsoft and weakens Microsoft’s dominance/monopoly with Office (Google seems to like things that threaten Microsoft).
5. Google Apps is nearly identical to GMail which helps Google improve its target advertising.
6. Google Apps is helping Google drive both a channel and penetration of its Android OS.
7. The marketplace opportunity for Google Apps is fueling the Google Ecosystem lifting multiple Google Services from YouTube to Android.

The only concern is that Google Apps does not appear to directly drive advertising revenue. Gmail and its free services do, but the paid versions of Google Apps do not. However, as noted in 5 above, the incremental cost from its free editions are at least partially covered by Apps’ annual service and support fees. That incremental cost of Google Apps vs. its benefits is probably very acceptable.

Also, I wanted to share a few bits that came to me after my post regarding UC moving-in on Apps:

BROADSOFT

William Blair & Company, a global investment firm, is bullish on BroadSoft and categories BSFT as “Outperform” with “Aggressive Growth.” Here’s some snippets from their analysis:

“Google and BroadSoft—comprising cloud office apps, hosted PBX and contact center, mobility, and cloud business apps (CRM, ERP, etc.) innately built on cloud infrastructure from the start is an effective way to deliver value for end-customers and fend off direct competition from traditional on-premise PBX vendors and Microsoft Lync”

“An innovative offshoot born from an original Google Apps’ reseller (Viwo), gUnify is working with the Broadsoft-based MSP, Simple Signal, to exchange sales leads in a joint go-to-market arrangement. GUnify developed a cloud plug-in using Google and BroadWorks APIs to tie the two together.”

“There are more than 5 million Google Apps users to date and Google is determinedly carving up considerable share in a cloud office market, which is expected to reach 695 million users by 2022 from 50 million today, according to Gartner.”

While this research largely agrees with my prior post, what’s surprises me is a case of the tail wagging the dog. BroadSoft’s stock is getting attention not because of its inherent solution, but because of its APIs that enable customers (Simple Signal) to leverage solutions from ISVs (gUnify). According to gUnify, which I met with at the UC Summit, they now have some 20 BroadSoft providers inquiring about partnership opportunities.

AVST

In the original post, I mentioned several enterprise UC companies that are embracing Google Apps, but missed AVST which already targets organizations constrained by poor UC interoperability. AVST addresses this on many levels – including Google Apps integration. AVST CX-E solution had supported Google Apps/Gmail messaging for years, but with release 8.5 support was expanded to include calendaring, presence, and contacts as well. Additionally, calendar events can automate CX-E availability changes.  For example, if you have a meeting from 10 to 11 am in your Google Calendar, CX-E can see that and automatically set your Availability to “In a Meeting” during that time period. Optionally, it also informs callers, “Dave Michels is in a meeting and will be back at 11 am.”

These new features, combined with AVST’s enterprise customer base and interoperability with just about every major UC platform (and native integration with NEC and Aastra) makes Google Apps integration potentially as simple as a software upgrade.

CCNA

I met with a firm called CCNA in Australia at the recent UC Summit. This is a Cisco HCS provider that is targeting education and writing their own integration to Google Apps. I instinctively get the BroadSoft Google Apps play that gUnify is pushing (mentioned in original post) because BroadSoft and Google Apps both realize demand from SMBs. But Cisco HCS tends to target 200+ and above implementations. However, as CCNA (clever Cisco innuendo in the name) is targeting higher-education. Education in general, and especially higher-ed is a strong sector for Google Apps adoption.

(Cross-posted @ TalkingPointz)

CloudAve is sponsored by Salesforce.com and Workday.

There are lots of ways to look at predictions of future PC, tablet and smart phone sales, but among the more important implications will happen in emerging markets, where network access historically has been a problem matched only by inability to afford a computing appliance.

“Low-cost tablets are reaching further into emerging regions where notebook PC penetration rates have remained low, resulting in cannibalization by tablet PCs.”” said Richard Shim, senior analyst with NPD DisplaySearch. 

Irrespective of what that means for suppliers of device, tablets will overcome the "cost of a PC" problem. 

Last September, when Apple debuted its new Lightning connector to replace the company's venerable 30-pin connector, I predicted that the move might cause surprising problems. My post attracted a lot of attention and garnered a whopping 135 comments. Many of those commenters agreed that Apple's move - while perhaps necessary, would have significant complications for the company. But many others said I was crazy to doubt Apple in any way, shape or form.

(See also iPhone 5's New Lightning Connector Is A Bigger Problem Than Apple Thinks.)

Well, according to an article by Nick Wingfield and Brian X. Chen in Sunday's New York Times, the move has indeed given Apple's rivals an edge in the push toward wireless accessories (Accessories No Longer Tethered To Apple).

In my original post, I warned that the peripheral market's commitment to the iPhone's 30-pin connector was a big competitive advantage for Apple, because being the one device that could attach directly to external speakers, clocks, stands and chargers added an extra helping of utility for its devices. I said that the new Lightning connector threatened to eliminate that advantage, and that could hurt Apple:

"The availability of all those peripherals, in turn, has helped make the iPhone even more popular. iPhone buyers know that no other phone comes close to enjoying the choices and support that the iPhone has - in cars, in hotel rooms, at airports and everywhere else. By carrying an iPhone instead of a competing phone, they have a much better chance of being able to buy and use supporting infrastructure - which can make a big difference in the overall experience. The iPhone 5’s new Lightning connector threatens all that, and not just for iPhone 5 users."

Sunday's Times' article seems to confirm that prediction:

"Apple’s iron grip on the digital accessories in hotel rooms, store shelves and living rooms is starting to slip - potentially risking the royalties it earns from accessory makers and, more significant, giving Apple customers more freedom to switch to rival products."

and

"Jeremy Horwitz, editor in chief of iLounge, a Web site devoted to Apple accessories, said Apple’s aggressive control over accessories for its products drove many makers to more open means of connecting devices, which helped feed the success of mobile devices made by other companies."

and 

"Fewer people who buy sound systems that work only with Apple devices, in theory, could mean fewer obstacles for those interested in switching to competing phones and tablets in the future."

To be fair, though, there has been an industry-wide movement toward wireless connections to peripherals, and Apple devices are fully capable of supporting this trend. It's just that the wireless world is pretty much a level playing field, while Apple used to utterly dominate hard-wired connections. You can't blame all of that on the Lightning connector, but as the Times pointed out:

"'Even before Apple shifted from the 30-pin connector to Lightning, the market had started shifting,' said Rory Dooley, senior vice president for music at Logitech. 'Lightning came in and accelerated some of the change.'"

As for me, I couldn't get my speaker docks to work with my iPhone 5, so I ended up using a "spare" Apple TV device to let me control the speakers using Airplay. Works for me, but probably not a cost-effective solution for most people.

VTech is hoping to tap into one of the last unexplored tablet markets: Infants.

The Hong Kong-based toy maker is targeting its Inno Tab 2 Baby at children from 1 to 9 years of age, expanding beyond the regular Inno Tab’s 4-to-9 year age range.

“The reality is that [the technology’s] there, and babies as young as 12 months just have this natural propensity to want to do whatever their parents are doing,” said Laurie Honza, director of product development of VTech Electronics North America.

Aesthetically, the Inno Tab 2 Baby looks like others in the Inno Tab line. Its thick plastic and protective gel skin are meant to render the tablet indestructible enough for little hands that would just as quickly throw it from a high chair as play with it. The Baby features different onboard content as well, including three baby apps, a Noah’s Ark e-book, and built-in music (six playtime melodies and six sleepy-time melodies).

For older kids, there’s a rotating camera and video recorder, licensed games from Nickelodeon and Disney, an art studio app and an organizer for scheduling soccer practices and visits to grandma’s house.

VTech also provides custom-designed hardware to make the interface easier for tots. Beyond its physical toughness, the Baby comes with two styluses shaped like triangles rather than cylinders, that provide a thicker, more easily graspable shape for tiny fingers.

According to the “Handbook of Research on the Education of Young Children,” children are exposed to new technologies long before they ever enter a preschool classroom. But, as VTech targets the youngest tablet demographic ever, how young is too young for children to be introduced to tech?

It’s a hot topic of debate. The National Association for the Education of Young Children and the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media, for example, released a joint statement last year discouraging parents from exposing children younger than 2 years old to screens.

However, Honza insists that interactivity is key, pointing to the Baby’s visual stimulation and how intrigued toddlers are by tapping the screen and watching what happens.

“If you hand over an iPad to a little one, you’ll see how easily engaged they are,” she said.

But it depends on how engaged.

“There is some research that looks at if you have mom, baby and media and there’s conversation and pointing and talking and labeling then that can actually lead to some learning,” said Brigid Barron, an associate professor in the School of Education at Stanford University, who specializes in the relationship between kids and technology. “Just sitting your 12-month-old down in front of media alone does not seem to lead to any learning.”

I conducted some very unscientific testing myself, plopping an Inno Tab 2 Baby in front of my various little cousins, aged 22 months to 9 years old. Most of them are pretty tech-savvy for their age. Edward, who is 7 years old, figured out how to unlock my Android phone within two minutes and navigate to the menu. Brooke, at 9 years old, has an iPod touch and regularly emails and FaceTimes with the other girls on her soccer team.

The results? Older kids like Edward and Brooke activated and navigated the Inno Tab with aplomb, if becoming a little bored quickly. Charlotte and Amanda are both 3 years old, but the former spends much more time playing with her parents’ smartphones. That showed — she’s also an Angry Birds whiz — since Charlotte had no problem playing with the Inno Tab. Amanda, on the other hand, passed most of her time using the stylus to madly scribble across the screen, without any particular objective.

Brandon, my youngest cousin, at 22 months, stared at the thick plastic contraption with the cluelessness of someone still trying to master the toilet. He seldom made it past the welcome screen, as he only focused on the Inno Tab’s physical buttons rather than its screen. That meant he hit the power button as soon as we would turn it on.

“I think he failed the test,” laughed Michael, his father.

With the older kids, the Inno Tab played over as well and intuitively as any educational tablet like the LeapPad. However, though younger kids such Brandon and Amanda fell within the right age range, it’s clear that outside guidance was necessary for them to figure out what the Inno Tab even did, emphasizing the need for parents to be present with their children as they play with the tablets.

“Parents just have to use a sort of common sense approach and look carefully and watch,” Barron said. “It’s most powerful if children can be playing with parents or peers so that they’re not just playing alone.”

The co-founder and CEO of the videoconferencing startup discusses collaboration, competition and Marissa Mayer.