Seth Weintraub

Some pretty incredible new features of Google+ Photos today that will probably be burying Picasa once and for all. Using their algorithms, they will enhance and help sort photos saving time and energy with the net result being incredible photo albums.

It isn’t a Nexus but it might as well be. Google announced a special version of the Samsung Galaxy S4 that will run stock Android, has an open boot loader and get updates straight from Google. You can buy 16GB (with open SD card slot) for AT&T and T-Mobile at the Play Store for $649 starting on June 25th.

Yay?
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More than 900 million Android devices have been activated to date. #io13 #keynote #io13android

— Google for Developers (@googledevs) May 15, 2013

Some Numbers:

• 48 billion app installs(2 billion under Apple)
• 2.5 billion installs in the last month
• more money payed out over last 4 months to developer than last year in total
• 2.5x revenue per user YOY From Google Play

48 billion application installs from Google Play – 2.5 billion in the last month.

— Android Developers (@AndroidDev) May 15, 2013

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Investors seem pretty optimistic about today’s events even though hardware and OS expectations have been tempered somewhat.

What might be interesting here is that if you negate Google and Apple’s cash on hand, the Market caps of the two companies are pretty close.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XclVwJP5GdM

We’re on hand at Google I/O today and will bring you the latest news at it happens. For those not able to attend, Google is providing a live stream of the event which will kick off at noon ET and is embedded above. We’ll see you there!

The guys at Droid-Life we able to snag some screenshots of the new Google Maps interface set to be released later today at I/O. This isn’t the first leak we’ve seen of the new look (check last week) but it does go into more detail and it appears that the screenshots are of the upcoming product announcement page. Google apparently removed the page after the sneak peak but all of the images are above in all their glory.
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In March, Fortune reported that Google had signed up Warner Music for an online music service similar but not identical to the popular Spotify service. Today, Greg Sandoval at The Verge is reporting that Universal and Sony Music have also signed on and the service will be launched tomorrow at Google I/O:

When Google rolls out the new services tomorrow at I/O, it will mean that it gets the jump on Apple, which is also trying to launch a new streaming-music service. According to reports, Google’s subscription services would resemble Spotify, and offer on-demand songs that would be streamed to their PCs and mobile devices. In contrast, Apple is working on an online radio service that is said to be more akin to Pandora, the top webcaster.

Google comes to these negotiations as a powerful player in music. While Google Play is still a relatively new service, insiders say YouTube is a juggernaut. The user-generated video site sees more than 800 million unique visitors a month and music videos are among the most popular fare.

I may not have exotic taste in music but I’ve never not been able to find whatever I want to listen to on YouTube. Google already owns the space and an advertising-based version of YouTube streaming is just a GUI change in my book.
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[protected-iframe id=”21771d77d6434337b7598abb88e78e36-22427743-13611283″ info=”http://new.livestream.com/accounts/2099733/events/2089675/videos/18329840/player?autoPlay=false&height=396&mute=false&width=704″ width=”704″ height=”396″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”]

Just in time for Google I/O, Facebook just posted some big news for Android developers:

At the end of Camp Hack-a-Thona (the name of our annual three day hackathon in the summer), I had a working prototype for Buck, a new Android build system. By the end of August, I introduced Buck as the build tool for our Android apps, and we deleted all of the build.xml files in our repository a couple of weeks later. It took less time to download Buck’s source code, build it from scratch, and then build the Android app with Buck than it took to build the Android app with Ant. From Day 1, Buck was twice as fast as Ant, cutting Facebook for Android app build times down from 3:40 to 1:30.

Buck has enabled us to scale our repository, as modules are defined by simple, declarative build rules, so the overhead in creating one is negligible. Today we have the equivalent of over 400 Android library projects in our repository (but only 51 AndroidManifest.xml files and 141 res/ directories), which would be unthinkable using Ant. Because all four of our Android apps (Facebook for Android, Messenger, and  Pages Manager) are built from one codebase with a single, unified directory of Java source code, code reuse is straightforward. This fine-grained design also makes it easier to create small, sample applications for testing individual features of an app. These sample apps can be built much more quickly than the full-blown Facebook for Android app, which helps our developers iterate faster.

The crowd at Mobile DevCon NYC convinced me that we should not keep this tool to ourselves and that it was time to open-source Buck. Watch the video here.

We are extremely excited to share Buck with the Android development community. You can check out the code from GitHub as well as explore the documentation. We hope that you find Buck as helpful in scaling and speeding up your Android development as we have.

A nice little pre-I/O surprise today from Google: Everyone who uses Gmail, G+ Photos and Google Drive now gets 15GB of free space across all three platforms instead of the previous 10 GB for Gmail and another 5 GB for Drive and Google+ Photos. That’s a lot of combined space

We’ll also be making updates to the Google Drive storage page, so you can better understand how you’re using storage space. Simply hover over the pie chart to see a breakdown of your storage use across Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos. And if you need more storage, this is your place to upgrade, with plans starting at $4.99/month for 100 GB.

Pro tip: This change means you’re no longer limited to a 25 GB upgrade in Gmail—any additional storage you purchase now applies there, too.

These changes to Google Drive storage will roll out over the next couple of weeks. Google Apps users will also be getting shared storage, so visit the enterprise blog to learn more.

Enterprise users get 30GB between the three platforms.
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BGR this morning said that AT&T wasn’t happy with the HTC First, the phone with the Facebook Home built in.

BGR has confirmed that HTC and Facebook’s little experiment is nearing its end. BGR has learned from a trusted source that sales of the HTC First have been shockingly bad. So bad, in fact, that AT&T has already decided to discontinue the phone.

Business Insider hears the same.  The chatter likely increased after AT&T dropped the price of the First to essentially Free last week.  An AT&T spokesperson just told us:

“As mentioned previously, we do pricing promotions all the time and have made no decisions on future plans.”

Clearly there is wiggle room on both sides here but no one can say that Facebook’s venture has been successful so far.
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I’m not going to lie, this is a bit depressing. Among other boilerplate-type of answers to good questions that Wired’s Steven Levey threw at him, Sundar Pinchai said:

What can we expect from I/O this year?

It’s going to be different. It’s not a time when we have much in the way of launches of new products or a new operating system. Both on Android and Chrome, we’re going to focus this I/O on all of the kinds of things we’re doing for developers, so that they can write better things. We will show how Google services are doing amazing things on top of these two platforms.

We’ll be on hand this week to see exactly what that means.

Some other tidbits from the interview: On Firefox OS: “It isn’t surprising. If we don’t do ChromeOS, someone else will”. On Google-branded hardware: “Any hardware projects we do will be to push the ecosystem forward”.
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Android Police’s Ron Amadeo has the details on the new syncing, matchmaking, notifications, game invites, achievements, leaderboards, and integration with other Google services that are inside the new Gaming APK that is being rolled out to devices.

Fresh out of Google HQ, we’ve managed to score a copy of the newGoogle Play Services v3.1.36, which is very slowly rolling out to devices right now. For comparison, the current Play Services that most people have is v3.0.27. 3.1 is a massive update – the strings file, for instance, has more than doubled from 300 to 700 entries. This is how Google is pushing out all the shared files for Google Play Games.

To make a long story short, there is a lot of new stuff here and most of it has ties to Google Plus. Shocking, I know.

Update (3:24 ET): I’m back online. are you?

Wait, the Drive icon on the Apps Status Dashboard changed again! What does this one mean? pic.twitter.com/eMcd5bTZXK

— Gabe Rivera (@gaberivera) May 10, 2013

If you are having issues with Google Drive, you aren’t alone. We’ve just lost our access to our online documents though our local sync seems to be working fine. Google’s Apps status page just went code orange indicating they are investigating the issue. Now let’s start talking about how safe your documents are in the Cloud.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TkKJR38nEgE

You may not want an HTC First Facebook Android phone but your mom probably does. So AT&T and NewGeekGuide are giving you a chance to win one with no contract or obligations (You can also get one ON CONTRACT for $1).

Mother’s Day is right around the corner and AT&T is celebrating moms with a fun, shareable video e-card for a special edition of the popular “It’s Not Complicated” campaign. In a new rendition of the commercial that will air Friday through Sunday, mediator Beck Bennett strays from his usual, “what’s better, bigger or smaller?” and instead asks, “who gives the best hugs?” to a unanimous response – mom does! The video e-card can be personalized, offering consumers a simple Mother’s Day themed e-card video, with Beck and the kids, to share with mom via social media (Twitter, Facebook, email). Make your own personalized version of the “It’s Not Complicated, Moms are the Best” video e-card at ATTMothersDay.com.   

You know the rules: To enter, simply follow @NewGeekGuide and retweet this post telling us why your mom would love an HTC First Facebook phone.

We’ll pick the winner on Mother’s Day.

Update: We have a winner!

https://twitter.com/antwonw/status/333672048553508865

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Well-connected Analyst Mingchi Kuo from KGI securities is known for his often accurate predictions (timing notwithstanding) of upcoming Apple products.  He’s got a detailed report out today on the new Nexus 7 that he thinks will be announced at Google I/O and could ship as early as June or July in large numbers.

Perhaps the most interesting bit is that the entry level price will  remain at US$199, with Google likely to lose US$5-10 per unit sold according to the analyst. Why is keeping the same price interesting? Because this thing is getting supercharged according to Kuo:

It will be interesting to see how close to the current display size the new screen is. 1920×1200 is a 16:10 screen ratio just like the current 1280×800 but enlarging it a few points would go a long way in making it more competitive with Apple’s 7.9-inch iPad Mini, and with the shrunken bezel size, Asus could keep the same handheld form factor.

I trekked down to Tribeca to see these folks talk and found them inspiring.  It is smart that Google is attaching its brand to these types of people/ideas.
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You can now download at the Play Store with a lot of new features this year:

Google just announced a nice bit of API code that will allow developers to to make it easy for readers of websites to download files to their Google Drive account.

Adding a Save to Drive button on your website is easy. You simply have to include the script and HTML tag below:

<script src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js"></script>
<div
 data-filename="My Statement.pdf"
 data-sitename="My Company Name"
 data-src="/path/to/myfile.pdf">
</div>

It isn’t hard to see how this could come in handy.

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This is potentially a huge move for Amazon because inexpensive Android handsets are blowing up in China and the State media generally distrusts/dislikes Google and its Play Store (which only currently ‘sells’ free content). Lots of opportunities exist – it will be interesting to see if Amazon can capitalize over other local app stores.
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[protected-iframe id=”6a39d604d3041c5d80bcc552f0f4cba5-22427743-13611283″ info=”http://www.nbc.com/assets/video/widget/widget.html?vid=n36353″ width=”704″ height=”390″ frameborder=”0″]

If you wonder what normals are thinking, the above is probably a good guess. Google would be well served to make a few more of those feel good movies to counter the rising sentiment against the product.
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