Last year at Google I/O, we talked about momentum, mobile and more. This year, we’re picking up right where we left off. More than 400 million Android devices have now been activated—up from 100 million last June. And twelve new Android devices are activated every every second—that’s more than 1 million a day. Today, we’re rolling out a new version of Android called Jelly Bean, adding more entertainment to Google Play, and introducing two powerful—yet distinctly different Nexus devices to bring you the best of Google.
Jelly Bean: simple, beautiful and beyond smart
Jelly Bean builds on top of Ice Cream Sandwich. It makes everything smoother, faster and more fluid. For example, notifications are now more dynamic: if you’re late for a meeting or missed a call, you can email or call directly from notifications. The keyboard is smarter and more accurate, and can predict your next word. And voice typing is faster, working even when you don’t have a data connection.
We’ve redesigned search from the ground up in Jelly Bean, with a new user interface and faster, more natural Voice Search. You can type your query or simply ask Google a question. Google can speak back to you, delivering a precise answer, powered by the Knowledge Graph, if it knows one, in addition to a list of search results.
Today’s smart devices still rely on you to do pretty much everything—that is, until now. Google Now is a new feature that gets you just the right information at just the right time. It tells you today’s weather before you start your day, how much traffic to expect before you leave for work, or your favorite team's score as they’re playing. There’s no digging required: cards appear at the moment you need them most.
Starting in mid-July, we’ll start rolling out over-the-air updates to Galaxy Nexus, Motorola Xoom and Nexus S, and we’ll also release Jelly Bean to open source.
Google Play: more entertainment
Google Play is your digital entertainment destination, with more than 600,000 apps and games plus music, movies and books. It’s entirely cloud-based, which means all of your content is always available across all of your devices. Today our store is expanding to include magazines. We’ve been working with leading publishers Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith and more to offer magazines like House Beautiful, Men’s Health, Shape andWIRED.
Now, you can also purchase movies in addition to renting them. And we’re adding television shows on Google Play—in fact, we’re adding thousands of episodes of broadcast and cable TV shows, like "Revenge," "Parks & Recreation" and "Breaking Bad," from some of the top studios, like ABC Studios, NBCUniversal and Sony Pictures. You can play back movies and TV shows on all your Android devices, through Google Play on the web, and on YouTube, and soon we’ll bring the experience to Google TV devices.
Movie purchases, TV shows and magazines are available today on play.google.com, and will roll out to Google Play on devices over the coming days.
Nexus 7: powerful, portable and designed for Google Play
All of this great Google Play content comes to life on Nexus 7, a powerful new tablet with a vibrant, 7” 1280x800 HD display. The Tegra-3 chipset, with a quad-core CPU and 12-core GPU, makes everything, including games, extremely fast. And best of all, it’s only 340 grams, lighter than most tablets out there. Nexus 7 was built to bring you the best of Google in the palm of your hand. Hang out with up to 10 friends on Google+ using the front-facing camera, browse the web blazingly fast with Chrome and, of course, crank through your emails with Gmail.
Nexus 7 comes preloaded with some great entertainment, including the movie "Transformers: Dark of the Moon," the book “The Bourne Dominion,” magazines like Condé Nast Traveler and Popular Science, and songs from bands like Coldplay and the Rolling Stones. We’ve also included a $25 credit to purchase your favorite movies, books and more from Google Play, for a limited time. Nexus 7 is available for preorder today from Google Play in the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia, and starts at $199 in the U.S. It will start shipping mid-July.
Nexus Q: It’s a sphere!
It's great to be able to take your entertainment with you wherever you go, but sometimes you want to ditch the headphones and enjoy music with friends and family. So we’re introducing Nexus Q, which combines the power of Android and Google Play to easily stream music and video in your home—all controlled by an Android phone or tablet. Designed and engineered by Google, Nexus Q is a small sphere that plugs into the best speakers and TV in your house. It’s the first-ever social streaming device—like a cloud-connected jukebox where everyone brings their own music to the party. Available first in the U.S., you can preorder Nexus Q today from Google Play for $299, and it will ship mid-July.
If you own one of the 400 million Android devices out there, you already know that it’s much more than simply a phone or tablet. It’s your connection to the best of Google—all of your stuff and entertainment, everywhere you go. Now you have a new version of Android, more entertainment and a growing portfolio of Nexus devices to choose from—all available in Google Play. The playground is open.
2. Project Glass demo: Hangouts IN Air
This morning at the Google I/O conference we did a special kind of demo. I'm very proud of the talented skydivers, mountain bikers and rappellers we worked with to push technology limits while showing the amazing potential of Project Glass. Check out one of their practice jumps.
We want to share more about this demonstration with all of you, so please tune in live tomorrow—weather permitting!—at roughly 11:00a.m. PDT on YouTube.
You might just catch another Hangout in Air.
3. Using large-scale brain simulations for machine learning and A.I.
You probably use machine learning technology dozens of times a day without knowing it—it’s a way of training computers on real-world data, and it enables high-quality speech recognition, practical computer vision, emailspam blocking and even self-driving cars. But it’s far from perfect—you’ve probably chuckled at poorly transcribed text, a bad translation or a misidentified image. We believe machine learning could be far more accurate, and that smarter computers could make everyday tasks much easier. So our research team has been working on some new approaches to large-scale machine learning.
Today’s machine learning technology takes significant work to adapt to new uses. For example, say we’re trying to build a system that can distinguish between pictures of cars and motorcycles. In the standard machine learning approach, we first have to collect tens of thousands of pictures that have already been labeled as “car” or “motorcycle”—what we call labeled data—to train the system. But labeling takes a lot of work, and there’s comparatively little labeled data out there.
Fortunately, recent research on self-taught learning (PDF) and deep learning suggests we might be able to rely instead on unlabeled data—such as random images fetched off the web or out of YouTube videos. These algorithms work by building artificial neural networks, which loosely simulate neuronal (i.e., the brain’s) learning processes.
Neural networks are very computationally costly, so to date, most networks used in machine learning have used only 1 to 10 million connections. But we suspected that by training much larger networks, we might achieve significantly better accuracy. So we developed a distributed computing infrastructure for training large-scale neural networks. Then, we took an artificial neural network and spread the computation across 16,000 of ourCPU cores (in our data centers), and trained models with more than 1 billion connections.
We then ran experiments that asked, informally: If we think of our neural network as simulating a very small-scale “newborn brain,” and show it YouTube video for a week, what will it learn? Our hypothesis was that it would learn to recognize common objects in those videos. Indeed, to our amusement, one of our artificial neurons learned to respond strongly to pictures of... cats. Remember that this network had never been told what a cat was, nor was it given even a single image labeled as a cat. Instead, it “discovered” what a cat looked like by itself from only unlabeled YouTube stills. That’s what we mean by self-taught learning.
One of the neurons in the artificial neural network, trained from still frames from unlabeled YouTube videos, learned to detect cats.
We’re reporting on these experiments, led by Quoc Le, at ICML this week. You can get more details in our Google+ post or read the full paper (PDF).
We’re actively working on scaling our systems to train even larger models. To give you a sense of what we mean by “larger”—while there’s no accepted way to compare artificial neural networks to biological brains, as a very rough comparison an adult human brain has around 100 trillion connections. So we still have lots of room to grow.
And this isn’t just about images—we’re actively working with other groups within Google on applying this artificial neural network approach to other areas such as speech recognition and natural language modeling. Someday this could make the tools you use every day work better, faster and smarter.
The pydf command displays the amount of used and available space on your file systems, just like df command, but in colors. The output format is completely customizable.
I'm ashamed of Apple, and myself for giving anything to iPhone today. To celebrate iPhone's fifth anniversary, I asked BetaNews writers to offer missives based on their experience using the handset. We published Wayne Williams' story on Wednesday, another by Chris Wright early day and my own this afternoon. Two other stories are in the queue. We'll run them over the weekend, however, instead of today. There's no longer any sense of birthday celebration in these halls.
Today, US District Judge Lucy Koh gave Apple a great gift for iPhone's fifth, that I see as anything but. Apple'spreliminary injunction against the Samsung-manufactured, Google-branded Galaxy Nexus is an outrage and demonstrates how far fallen is Steve Jobs' company from the innovative spirit that brought iPhone to market. The original set the smartphone market ablaze and brought Apple to unimagined success as seen from 2007. There was a time when Apple innovated rather than litigated and up-ended so-called copycats by making bold, breath-taking successor products. But that Apple is gone, buried with Jobs, who sadly left this world last year.
Before the litigious spirit invaded Apple, innovation negated any need for litigation. iPod nano is my favorite example. In January 2004, Apple announced iPod mini, in five delicious colors, and started shipping about six weeks later. The music player immediately sold out. I luckily got one for my wife for Mother's Day because Apple Store Montgomery Mall opened that weekend and stocked iPod mini for the occasion.
By autumn 2005, competitors started shipping iPod mini knock-offs to stores for the holidays. Rather than meet them, Apple did something truly innovative, from a product marketing perspective: Left them behind. The company killed off iPod mini at the height of its popularity, a simply unthinkable act in retail, and replaced it with something better. In September 2005, in a stunning product unveiling, Jobs showed off the diminutive iPod nano, pulling it out of the coin pocket of his jeans. The gum-box sized music player was an instant hit.
Imitative Innovation
iPod mini is a great example of what Apple does best: imitative innovation. The company culls from what others do and improves on it. Sadly, idiot fanboys will comment about how Apple imitates no one, just innovates. These guys really need to get out more into the real world. There's nothing wrong with imitation. There's everything rightabout it. Humans are gregarious and observing of each other. Copying, imitating is natural. How do you think babies learn to walk and to talk? They imitate adults.
Designers are some of the biggest imitators of all, looking to past successes and extended them to the present. In 1927, Kodak commissioned Walter Dorwin Teague to design a new line of cameras. The company wanted to increase its cameras' appeal among women. Teague presented the diminutive Vest Pocket line in five distinct colors. Nearly 80 years later, Apple chief designer Jony Ive applied the same five-color concept to iPod mini. Similarly, like Teague presented a smaller camera, Ive designed a smaller music player. Ive learned from Teague and paid homage to him, appropriately. iPod mini was the Kodak camera of its age -- life-changing consumer tech for the masses.
Jobs recognized the value of imitation as a way of driving innovation. In a 1990's interview he said: "Picasso had a saying, he said: 'Good artists copy, great artists steal'. We have, you know, always, ah, been shameless about stealing great ideas". That's what good artists do. They extend the great work of others and in so doing honor them.
So it's no surprise that Apple expected imitation and chose to check it through continuation innovation. That's the lesson iPod nano teaches and subsequent other Apple products, particularly those that defied convention and in process imitation. The original iPod should have been easily imitated, but competitors didn't get why the product succeeded. I spoke to some of them during the mid-Noughties, when working as an analyst. They bulked up features, such as FM radio listening or broadcasting, all while sacrificing battery life. Apple prioritized other attributes, such as simply sync, long battery life and easy use -- meanwhile making iPod smaller and cheaper to buy. iPod was more by being much less.
The Pride is Gone
iPhone is another example of imitative innovation. Apple didn't invent the smartphone, but its slate-design approach, capacitive touchscreen and use of proximity sensors transformed the user experience. The original iPhone responded to users and took on human-like qualities. Two problems overlapped: iPhone's revolution became an evolution of further designs. Meanwhile some competitors, Samsung most of all, got what made iPhone good. Samsung's imitative innovation propelled it to become, last quarter, the world's top handset manufacturer, and also for smartphones, as measured by sales, according to Gartner.
Apple fell behind Samsung, responding surprisingly. The Apple that once out-innovated competitors chooses to litigate when out-imitated. Rather than compete with Samsung and Android 4.x, Apple sues over patents -- many for arguably vague software processes. Koh's ruling is shameful. Apple demanding the preliminary injunction is shameful. The pride of 2005, when Apple outflanked copycats through innovation, is the shame of 2012.
Today, court briefs are the true measure and extent of Apple innovation. Apple can copy -- innovate by imitation -- but one else. Apple engineers, you should feel ashamed at what suits -- the people wearing them and cases they file -- your company has become.
As an American I want to feel pride in Apple's accomplishments. Instead, three weeks ago, I boycotted Apple products because of the patent bullying. Today, I feel ashamed, because it's not enough.
6. Nexus 10: Three extra inches of BYOD Hell
It’s relentless. Just when my psyche was beginning to recover from the Nexus 7 bombshell, here comes the Nexus 10. A rumored upsized-version of Google’s recently announced reference platform, the Nexus 10 will be to the iPad what the Nexus 7 is to the Kindle: An immediate, existential threat pounding on the gates of Fort Cupertino.
To Apple, the thought of an ultra-cheap (think sub-$300), 10-inch iPad fighter must send chills down CEO Tim Cook’s spine. But to me, the Nexus 10 represents something much worse: Three extra inches of BYOD hell for enterprise IT shops.
You see, with the Nexus 7, IT shops could make a reasonable argument that it’s just a media consumption device, and thus not appropriate for enterprise use. Plus, it’s unlikely that many users would think of using a Nexus 7 as a laptop replacement in a corporate setting. At 7 inches, the screen is simply too small for serious work (though I know Playbook owners who would argue otherwise).
However, with the Nexus 10, users will likely purchase the device as an iPad alternative. And as many IT shops have learned to their dismay, 10 inches is just the right size to inspire all sorts of crazy thoughts in otherwise sane people. Thoughts like, "it’s so thin and light -- do I really need to haul around my company-issued laptop?" Or, "my Nexus 10 is so convenient, I wonder if I can use it to VPN into the home office network?"
And then the fun begins. Now, instead of supporting one consumer-focused tablet platform, you’re forced to support two -- both from equally IT-hostile companies that are more interested in ensuring “buttery smooth” UI transitions than preserving enterprise policies regarding security or data integrity. It’s the perfect storm of BYOD mayhem, and IT management will be lucky to survive with their collective sanities intact.
Fortunately, the Nexus 10 is still only a rumor. With any luck, Google will look around at the carnage wrought by the various failed attempts to dethrone the iPad and realize that it’s just not worth the effort. Or perhaps they’ll concede the 10-inch challenger role to Microsoft and let the Redmond behemoth do the heavy work of cracking the iPad’s tablet hegemony. Google can then swoop in with an even more polished “sweet treat du jour” and exploit the beachhead established by Surface.
In the meantime, IT shops would do well to check their defenses. If your organization has so far managed to resist the iPad BYOD onslaught, then now is the time to reinforce the bulkheads by embracing a more enterprise-friendly alternative, like Windows 8. But if the enemy is already inside the gates, then you’re only solution is to isolate and compartmentalize the invaders with a comprehensive MDM solution. That way you’ll have the tools and experience you need to repel the initial advance and eventually subdue the opposing force within a blanket of strict IT policies and best practices.
No matter how you slice it, a Nexus 10 tablet device is bad news for IT. Here’s hoping that the upsized tablet’s little brother, the Nexus 7, flops big time, and that Google loses their nerve. Otherwise, we’ll find ourselves fighting a war on two fronts. In the winter. In Asia. A scenario that rarely turns out well for the protagonists.
7. ADOBE FLASH IS DEAD -- on mobile!
From the halls of Adobe come the bells of impending death tolls. The master slayed its dragon. Flash is dead. The words from Adobe today in a public blog post mark another major blow to Flash, at least in the mobile form. The company announced that it will no longer develop Flash for Android after Android 4.0. There will be no certified implementations for Android 4.1.
Earlier this week, during its developer conference, Google officially unveiled the newest Android version -- Jellybean -- which replaces the stock browser with Chrome, for which Flash already isn't available. Google released Chrome for Android beta, supporting on v4 Ice Cream Sandwich, in February. From that perspective, the announcement, and timing, isn't super surprising.
Starting August 15, Adobe will also limit access to the Flash Player in the Google Play Store to only devices that already have it installed and later removing it entirely. This is a major death blow to the Flash platform -- seemingly now to match the prophetic reasons the late Steve Jobs blocked it from the iPhone (although his reasons had more to do with Apple platform competition than anything else).
Strangely, Adobe could do more to end Android fragmentation than anything Google has done. Nearly 93 percent of Android devices have versions older than Ice Cream Sandwich. Google has given no indication that Chrome will ever be available for them. As Flash disappears, and the utility of the stock Android browser further decreases, cellular carriers and phone manufacturers may face increasing customer pressure to get devices off Gingerbread, which has the largest install base, and onto Android 4.x.
Clearly fragmentation is a problem for Adobe, which cites time-consuming device certification as one reason to abandon Flash on Android:
Certification includes extensive testing to ensure web content works as expected, and that the Flash Player provides a good user experience. Certified devices typically include the Flash Player pre-loaded at the factory or as part of a system update.
With the increase in the speed of the Android platform roadmap, and Chrome rising above the stock browser, Adobe just doesn't want to continue. However, in the blog post, the developer reiterates its support for the PC market. But I say they know the writing's on the wall.
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