Google, eager to salvage its security-related reputation in the wake of disclosures about the NSA's PRISM surveillance program, has asked a secretive intelligence court to let it disclose more details regarding government requests for information about its users, reports the Washington Post. 

In a legal filing Tuesday, Google cited a First Amendment right to speak about the information it must legally provide to the government. The company is seeking to have the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court lift a gag order that prevents companies from discussing or describing surveillance orders issued by that court, even in general terms. 

(See also: Tech Firms And Others Are Sharing — A Lot — With U.S. Spies And The Pentagon)

Google announces new Nexus smartphones and tablets when it ships new versions of Android. With every sugary dessert iteration, avid Android fans get flagship devices running unadulterated Android (free of the skins and bloatware from manufacturers and carriers) to satiate their geeky desires. 

The only problem? Google hasn’t announced a new version of Android yet. And there is no firm timetable for when it will.

Google had set a pattern of announcing the newest Android versions at its I/O developer conference over the last couple of years. Android developers got lots of goodies from Google this year at I/O (Android Studio and a bevy of monetization tools) but a shiny new version of Android was not among the announcements. 

To make up for the missing Android refresh (and the related lack of new Nexus devices), Google has made deals to bring the stock Android user interface to the most popular smartphones currently on the market. 

Google announced the availability of a “Google Edition” Samsung Galaxy S4 running the Nexus user interface during the I/O keynote. The well-received HTC One will also come out with a Google Edition Nexus version. Gadget manufacturer LG shipped a white version of the Nexus 4. Both the Google Edition Galaxy S4 and HTC One with the Nexus user interface will be available on the Google Play store on June 26th and will be unlocked and ready to use on T-Mobile or AT&T in the United States. The price will be fairly steep though, with the HTC One selling for $599 and the S4 for $650. In comparison, the Nexus 4 from LG was only $299 when it was released in November 2012. 

“When It’s Ready”

I was sitting in a room with a Google executive on the Android team shortly after the I/O keynote address. Ostensibly, we were taking about apps. Lots and lots of apps. Yet I couldn’t ignore the elephant in the room.

“So,” I asked, trying to sound casual, “when is the next version of Android coming out?”

The exec smiled. This question was not unexpected. Google did not announce a new version of Android during I/O. Not a new version of Android Jelly Bean or the rumored Android 5.0 Key Lime Pie. Nothing.

“When it’s ready,” she said. 

That is a very Apple-like response from Google and not one that the company has employed previously with Android. Google historically has released new versions of Android at a breakneck pace as it worked to create feature parity with iOS and other mobile platforms. 

That parity was largely achieved with the release of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and arguably surpassed since with the two updates of version 4.1 and 4.2 Jelly Bean. Google now has the ability to be patient with the next release of Android as opposed to iterating something minor on the top of what has become a stable, feature-rich platform.

The longest that Google has gone without announcing a major new named version of Android has been seven months (between version 2.1 Éclair and 2.2 Froyo and again between Froyo and 2.3 Gingerbread). Google has already gone seven months between its last platform update (with Jelly Bean 4.2) and almost a full year between named versions with Jelly Bean 4.1 released in July 2012. 

By the time Google comes out with its next major Android update, it will be the longest the platform has ever gone without a new named version. We don’t know when the next version is coming, but a fair presumption is that Android 5.0 Key Lime Pie will drop sometime this fall, just in time for the holiday device buying season.

Google's Challenge: Keeping Device Makers & Android Users Happy

When it comes to Google’s Android flagship Nexus devices, the search giant has a massive balancing act to perform. On one hand, it needs to stroke the egos of its primary manufacturing partners like Samsung, HTC and LG. On the other hand, it has a legion of loyal Android fans that just want their new Nexus devices to be the best of the best, run un-skinned and unadulterated Android and be reasonably inexpensive. 

The “Google Edition” versions of the Galaxy S4 and HTC One are a compromise from Google between these two factions. Users get the chance to get some of the best devices currently on the market running the stock Android user interface. Manufacturers get the privilege of having “Nexus” editions while also being able to charge full price for their top devices. Google wins because it was able to get ostensible Nexus devices to market without yet having to come out with a new version of Android. 

How will this play out in the future? LG made the last Nexus smartphone but has said that it will not be making the next one. Samsung had the previous two Nexus smartphones before that (as well as the Nexus 10 tablet that shipped last November) and HTC made the first Nexus device. Asus has made the Nexus 7 tablets thus far. Google owns Motorola and has said that it treats the company like any of its other Android manufacturing partners, which would put Motorola in the running for a Nexus device in the future. 

The expansion of Chromebook inventories doesn't stop there, according to Google's blog post yesterday. Starting this weekend, Staples will have Chromebooks from Acer, HP and Samsung in every one of its 1,500-plus U.S. stores.

Expansion is coming to other markets as well, wrote David Shapiro, Director of Chromebook Marketing:

In addition to Dixons in the UK, now 116 Tesco stores are selling Chromebooks, as well as all Media Markt and Saturn stores in the Netherlands, FNAC stores in France and Elgiganten stores in Sweden. In Australia, all JB Hi-Fi and Harvey Norman stores will be carrying Chromebooks for their customers as well.

While sales numbers of Chromebooks have not been made available, the numbers must be at least decent enough for Wal-Mart, Staples and the rest of these retail outlets to be interested in selling them. Clearly, a repeat of the HP TouchPad debacle is not happening here.

Is the Chromebook about to succeed in a market that seems to lean hard on tablets? Thinking about getting one yourself? Let us know.

Image courtesy of Google.

If ever we needed confirmation that markets, not courtrooms, should decide the technologies we use, witness SCO Group's reborn dream to sue all of UNIX-dom into its wallet. It was a specious lawsuit in 2003 when SCO Group (now Xinuos) first launched its $1 billion broadside against IBM. It's even more farcical today. Sadly, it's not clear that the legal fights between Apple and Samsung, or Oracle and Google, are much better.

First, to SCO Group.

SCO Is Like A Cockroach

You can be forgiven for thinking bankruptcy, unsympathetic judges and the truth would have killed SCO's chances of getting its $1 billion IBM payday. That is, you can be forgiven for thinking that occasionally common sense prevails in the courtroom. But as Groklaw notes, a judge has just granted SCO Group (Xinuos) a new lease on its litigious life. Basically, Xinuos wants a "redo," suggesting that its bankruptcy proceedings unfairly foreclosed its ability to troll.

And let's be clear: this is all about trolling.

It's perhaps fitting that the company that acquired SCO Group's assets, Xinuos, lists four members of management, three of whom are operations and sales-focused (read: keeping costs down while they swing for the litigation fences), and only one is an engineer. That engineer is too embarrassed to show his face:

This is a company set up to sue. In common parlance, it is a troll. Fittingly, it's headquartered in Las Vegas, where the culture of rolling the dice on speculative "investments" pervades.

SCO Group reborn as UnXis renamed to Xinuos should be dead. The lawsuit that tormented the industry for years should have been declared stillborn when first launched. And yet we continue to live with this silly charade.

More Respectable Lawsuits

Not that industry litigation between respectable companies fares much better. 

Samsung just got a ban on Apple's importation of old iPhones. Previous to this, Apple won $1 billion from Samsung plus an injunction against Samsung shipping certain phones. The injunction was subsequently wiped out and the damages were trimmed 43%.

It's a tit-for-tat with no end (or victor) in sight.

The same holds true for Oracle's lawsuit against Google over the use of Java in Android. The two parties trade victories and defeats, then appeal, and cross-appeal ad nauseum. The only winners in this and other lawsuits are the attorneys collecting fees.

The Market Rolls On

Despite all of this nonsense, consumers and businesses continue to make purchasing decisions based on quality and value, not lawsuits. Linux has eclipsed UNIX and threatens Windows. Android dominates the mobile landscape. Not one of these inane lawsuits has changed these facts.

So why do credible firms like Apple and Oracle follow the lead of trolls like SCO Group?

Perhaps they hope to delay the inevitable. If Apple can slow Samsung's market share gains, it stands to make even more profits. 

Or perhaps they hope to get paid for others' successes. Microsoft makes serious money on Android, despite not contributing anything of value to its development. Oracle may hope to achieve the same in its lawsuit with Google, but part of its strategy may simply be to ensure that others continue to license Java, even if Google refuses, as I've written before.

In some cases, technology firms sue in order to discover competitors' trade secrets in the course of the litigation.

Or maybe, just maybe, they're all suing, as Gizmodo opines, because the patent system is irretrievably broken and so much money is at stake in these emerging markets like mobile. 

In the case of Xinuos, however, there's just one reason for its cockroach-like existence: to roll the dice one more time in the hope of getting something for nothing. Let's hope it fails in a way that it finally, truly dies.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Given that Google shared their new program with U.K. publication The Telegraph, Google was certainly responding to increasing political pressure from the U.K., most notably Prime Minister David Cameron's remarks on June 10 that called Google and other search engine companies out for enabling the proliferation of such images on the Internet.

The new program certainly sounds promising: the company will be working to create a database of flagged images within a year's time that will be shared with other search engines in the hopes that such content will "be wiped from the web in one fell swoop," the Telegraph proclaimed.

Unfortunately, the end of all child pornography is not going to be the result of such a program, as images of raped and abused children will not be eliminated from the Internet but - at best - far less likely to come up in search results on Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.

Google Giving Director Jacqueline Fuller detailed the program with far less hyperbole on Google's official blog Saturday:

Since 2008, we’ve used "hashing" technology to tag known child sexual abuse images, allowing us to identify duplicate images which may exist elsewhere. Each offending image in effect gets a unique ID that our computers can recognize without humans having to view them again. Recently, we've started working to incorporate encrypted "fingerprints" of child sexual abuse images into a cross-industry database. This will enable companies, law enforcement and charities to better collaborate on detecting and removing these images, and to take action against the criminals. Today we've also announced a $2 million Child Protection Technology Fund to encourage the development of ever more effective tools.

Even if these horrific images are identified, that doesn't automatically remove them from the Internet. It takes law enforcement and Internet service provider intervention to do that, as Filler stated.

And there's the fact that, for all their power, Google and the other search engines do not have the entire Internet tracked. Estimates vary wildly, with some guessing that Google may have up to 12% of the Web indexed, and others pegging that percentage as low as 0.04% of total Web content.

Whatever the figure, no one would ever give any of the search engines out there the credit for indexing the entire Web. Nor will the search engines ever get there, at least not the way they work now.

Search engines rely on following links to new content on the web. So, if a site containing illicit content is not linked to any other site, the search engines won't even know it's there.

And, even if they were able to find the site, search engines still abide by a site's robots.txt file, something that all automated web search crawler engines examine before stepping across a site's threshold. If the robots.txt file says no search engines allowed (and there are various legitimate reasons why an administrator might want to keep such crawlers out), then there's no indexing that will happen.

Google could, in the interests of hunting down illicit content, ignore the robots.txt restriction, but busting that honor system would negatively impact a lot of sites that have done nothing wrong.

Content can also be hidden on sites by putting it behind forms. Search engines don't index pages that are created when a form is filled in and then auto-generated by the content of that form. If they did, then search results would be inundated with product catalog content every time we looked for men's shirts.

To be clear, Google's program is a strong step in making it harder to find child pornography on the Internet - and that's a damn good thing. But sources that are known by purveyors of this content will still be available to provide material that exploits children. All the search engines are doing is making it harder for new searchers for this content to locate such content.

In the long run, politicians and citizens should be happier: if this program is successful, child pornography will be vastly decreased from easy public view. But this will be just a Potemkin village - a clean-looking version of the Internet that will not reflect the fact that these terrible images are still out there - just better hidden.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

The announcement was made on Google's official blog.

To help you outsmart traffic, today we’re excited to announce we’ve closed the acquisition of Waze. This fast-growing community of traffic-obsessed drivers is working together to find the best routes from home to work, every day.

The Waze product development team will remain in Israel and operate separately for now. We’re excited about the prospect of enhancing Google Maps with some of the traffic update features provided by Waze and enhancing Waze with Google’s search capabilities.

(See also: Google To Take Waze Out Of Play For $1.3 Billion)

We can all breathe easier now that Waze is bought.

Page's post, written with Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, is headlined "What the ..." Zuckerberg's language is similarly frank, referring to "outrageous press reports."

(See also: Congratulations! You've Been Auto-Upgraded To Citizenship 2.0)

Page and Zuckerberg both said the government did not have "direct access" to their servers. The Washington Post, which broke news about the PRISM program, reported that government agencies were "tapping directly into the central servers" of Google, Facebook and other companies.

But both CEOs' statements hint that there's something they're not saying. Page and Zuckerberg both call on the U.S. government to be more "transparent" about secret requests for user data, requests that the government can legally make under established procedures.

Some are suggesting that instead of tapping directly into company servers, the NSA is collecting data from Internet service providers as it flows over the Internet. Such collection has been going on for years—before the reported start of the PRISM program. 

President Barack Obama said in a press conference Friday that the data collection wasn't targeted at U.S. citizens and "helped prevent terrorist attacks.

The question we have been trying to answer at ReadWrite for a while is: why? Why do iPhone users spend more time on their devices? Why do developers make more money in the Apple App Store than Google Play? Where does this voodoo come from?

Nobody really has a good answer to this question. Psychology and sociology are hopeless dead ends. Demographic information about age, gender and location of users can only tell us so much. There are really no fundamental differences between the base groups of users of each platform. Android users are not from Mars and iPhone users are not from Venus. They are from the same neighborhoods in the same towns all across the world. 

Mobile analytics firm Flurry thinks it has some answers. In new research published today, Flurry gives three reasons why iOS dominates usage patterns, despite the fact that Android has the far higher install base. While Flurry doesn’t quite hammer the nail on the head, at least it is bringing some useful data to the discussion.

App Share Vs. Device Share

Flurry positions the battle as App Share versus Device Share. Apple leads in App Share while Android leads in Device Share. 

In the chart below, Flurry shows Device Share as a percent of iOS devices over the past four years (100% equals Apple while the line shows Android).

In the next chart, Flurry shows the difference in app usage between the two platforms (100% equals iOS owners app use with the line representing Android’s comparative percent of that use).

Why Is There A Difference?

Flurry posits three reasons for the difference between App Share and Device Share:

• A pocket computer against an upgraded phone: Flurry thinks that, since Apple popularized the concept of mobile app with the App Store, people were attracted to the iPhone and iPad for apps. “There’s an app for that,” became the popular marketing slogan for iPhones. Android on the other hand has cheaper devices, often given out for free by carriers on two-year contracts. The theory goes that Apple users were looking for pocket computers that were app-centric while Android users were just getting smarter phones where apps were a nice thing to have, but not essential.
• Fragmentation leads to limited app content: Apple has a fairly narrow mix of screen sizes and different versions of its iOS operating system for developers to contend with. Apple has four different screen sizes: 3.5-inches (all iPhones before the iPhone 5), 4-inches (iPhone 5), 7.9-inches (iPad Mini) and 9.7-inches (iPad). For the most part, Apple also has most of its users on the most recent version of iOS. Android, on the other hand, has a massive variety of screen sizes running older versions of the operating system on different type of computer processors. Because of this, Flurry postulates, the amount of content and the ability to easily update apps hurts Android against its iOS counterpart.
• Because Apple is bigger, it feeds off itself: Here, Flurry presents the avalanche effect. ”It is that the arguably larger and richer ecosystem of apps that exists for iOS feeds on itself. iOS device owners use apps so developers create apps for iOS users and that in turn generates positive experiences, word-of-mouth, and further increases in app use,” Flurry’s report states. 

If you couple Flurry’s theories with some recent data from research firm Experian, some of it starts to make sense. Android users spend 28% of their time with their smartphones making calls. iPhone users spend 22% of their time on calls. That supports the notion that Android owners are using their smartphones more as upgraded phones than pocket computers. iPhone users spend more time texting. Other than that, the difference between usage of each platform is fairly similar.

Do you agree with Flurry’s theories? Or is the difference between App Share and Device Share an unquantifiable phenomenon? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Is there any reason to expect this to change?

More Than Just Dumb Pipes

For years telcos have looked for ways to maximize the value of their networks, getting away from the characterization that they're merely "dumb pipes." In theory, cloud computing is an ideal way to do this and plays to the carriers strengths: existing billing relationships with businesses that need cloud computing resources and ownership of the networks so as to ensure quality of service. As Alcatel-Lucent has been telling the world since at least 2011, most cloud providers can't promise high service-level guarantees because they rely on others' networks and commodity, failure-prone hardware.

More recently, carriers like AT&T have been talking up the capability to "expose [a carrier's] network and billing capabilities as APIs, letting business customers seamlessly integrate AT&T's capabilities into their own internal apps without extra logins." In order to compete, telecom operators like AT&T have spent $17 billion to build out their cloud technology portfolios, according to IDC, including Verizon's $1.4 billion acquisition of Terremark in 2011 to give it a lead in cloud computing know-how.

The technology is there. The will is there. What seems to be missing for the carriers is a focus on the right customer. 

Overlooking The Developer

At the most basic level, carriers have proved to be terrible marketeers of cloud services. In large part this revolves around the person to whom the carriers market their services: businesses.

After all, the carriers largely ignore the developer, and that's a huge mistake in a market that is driven by developers. As much as carrier clouds may make sense for a business with an existing billing relationship with Verizon or another carrier, it's almost certainly the case that the person actually writing applications for the cloud isn't privy to that billing relationship. Instead, she's the developer down the hall who signs up for AWS because she just wants to get work done as conveniently as possible.

AT&T's Laura Merling gets this, and has been nudging the carrier toward open APIs in a bid to attract developers. It's a good start, but has it come too late?

The Google In The Room

After all, Amazon isn't the only company with developer cred. Google, for example, groks developers. Google I/O was one big geek fest, with the opening keynote lasting hours and bursting with developer love.

Nor is Google's developer outreach merely a matter of marketing. According to one ex-AWS engineer, Google also threatens Amazon because it arguably bests Amazon in compute performance. And while Amazon makes developers happy with consistent price decreases, Google has gone one step further and offered minutely, rather than hourly, rates, which saves developers on downtime. 

Google, then, is a legitimate threat to Amazon. The carriers? Not so much. Not until they stop trying to sell top-down to businesses and instead recognize that the cloud is very much a bottom-up phenomenon, driven by and for developers.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

In April, Google announced it would shut down CalDAV, an open standard application programming interface, or API, that developers used to access calendar data across the Web. A few big-name outfits — like, say, Microsoft — would retain access to CalDAV to keep their apps syncing with Google Calendar. All other developers were encouraged to use Google's own Google Calendar API, a move ReadWrite's Matt Asay decried as part of Google's march away from open standards.

Enough developers complained, however, that Google has done a U-turn and will not only keep CalDAV available to all developers, it will also provide access to CardDAV, a similar API for accessing contact information. Both APIs are also getting updates that enable OAuth 2.0 authentication and integration with the Google APIs Console.

See? The 'Plex really does care. Sometimes.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Google has partnered with Boston-based mobile cloud services company Kinvey to easily connect mobile applications to its Google App Engine cloud. The partnership is specifically targeted at enterprise developers who tend to require a lot of support, consume a lot of data and need simple solutions to create and support cloud infrastructure for their mobile devices.

“Developers using Kinvey can deploy directly from Kinvey into App Engine. The reciprocal also holds true. Developers using App Engine can consume Kinvey's services using the libraries we’ve built for App Engine,” said Joe Chernov, VP of Marketing at Kinvey.

The announcement comes two days after Google announced a “Mobile Backend Starter” for tying Android apps to Google App Engine. The partnership between Google and Kinvey will expand on the fairly simple starter package and also allow developers building iOS and HTML5 apps to tie their cloud infrastructure to App Engine.

Enticing Developers With The Cloud

If you are looking to build a mobile application with rich cloud functionality, you have a few options. You could build it yourself by selecting and configuring a technology stack; writing all the code and connecting the application programming interfaces and then deploy it and secure it. Good luck finding a developer who knows how to do all of that and doesn’t cost an arm and a leg.

Or, you could have a fairly simple automated process do it all for you.

That is the opportunity that several startup companies saw a couple years ago. StackMob, Parse, Appcelerator, Kinvey, Applicasa, FeedHenry and a variety of others moved quickly to serve this need, which has been termed “Backend as a Service” (BaaS) in the developer world. It didn’t take long for the large cloud providers and mobile platform owners (like Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook) to realize that they needed to offer this type of service and each have moved aggressively to build their own capabilities, partner with the startups providing these solutions or straight-up acquire the companies making them.

The basic thought from the ecosystem owners is, “we’ll make it easy for you to build cloud infrastructure if you build for our platforms.” That is one of the prime reasons that Facebook bought Parse earlier this year, to bring brands to Facebook’s app ecosystem. Microsoft has Azure Mobile Services, which is essentially its own BaaS offering. It is why Google is partnering with Kinvey, to bring enterprises to both Android as well as App Engine.

The Maturation of Kinvey

Kinvey started as three guys from Austin, Texas with an idea to make it easier for developers to build cloud infrastructure for their apps. Kinvey got its wings as a participant in the TechStars Boston 2011 class and has been growing since. 

Kinvey’s technology stack has grown in the last two years to the point where it would be economically difficult for any company to build from scratch.

“To build your own back-end stack, you’d probably need a year and a million dollars,” said Kinvey CEO Sravish Sridhar in a recent discussion.

Kinvey has moved aggressively to fill out that stack with partnerships (such as with push message service Urban AirShip, media cloud provider Brightcove and now Google) and has become a leader in helping developers solve problems with its helpful content marketing campaign.

Kinvey may be a champion of developers, but it also knows where the money is. Since leaving TechStars, Kinvey has made a push to become the cloud integrator for enterprises looking to scale mobile applications. The App Engine partnership with Google and its status as preferred technology partner with Facebook should help accelerate this growth. 

Lead image courtesy Shutterstock.

Google updated its developer policies for creating Google Glass apps (called Glassware) over the weekend to ban sexually explicit material, building an Apple-like walled garden for Google Glass.

From the content policies, Section D – 1 of Google’s Glass platform developer policies:

We don't allow Glassware content that contains nudity, graphic sex acts, or sexually explicit material. Google has a zero-tolerance policy against child pornography. If we become aware of content with child pornography, we will report it to the appropriate authorities and delete the Google Accounts of those involved with the distribution.

This will come as a disappointment to any people that desired to see naked, copulating bodies hover in their line of vision all day long. Or developers looking to serve those people. 

(See Also: 5 Socially Unacceptable Things To Do With Google Glass)

Porn's Leading Innovator Already Has An App For Glass

The news comes as leading adult mobile app maker MiKandi is ready to release a porn app on Glass called “Tits and Glass” (NSFW). It would allow users to browse adult content and vote on it. Also, since one of the prime features of Glass is the fact it is a camera attached to your face, MiKandi allowed for users to shoot their own videos with Glass and upload them to the site. 

MiKandi has its own adult app store for Android. Google bans adult content from the Google Play Android app store, but MiKandi apps can be side-loaded as third-party apps outside of Google's purview. It is likely that the MiKandi Google Glass app could also be side-loaded, but that would likely mean a user would have to root their Glass, which Google has explicitly said will void their warranty (while also showing them just how to do it). 

You have to give credit to MiKandi for realizing the potential of Google Glass as a porn distribution mechanism. The ability to watch porn as a small screen hovering above your eye really could bring a whole new kind of, err, interaction to the medium. Just as happened with smartphones, many industries are probing the capabilities of Glass, from content properties like the New York Times to social networks like Path to real estate platform Trulia. 

Porn Always Finds A Way

Google may be able to stop an app maker like MiKandi from creating porn apps for Glass, but there's really nothing Google can do about people who want to record and upload their sexual adventures. With Glass, Google has given people cameras. It just so happens these cameras are attached to peoples’ faces. Google cannot regulate what people do with their own cameras or where they upload that content. 

There may not be much Google can do in the long run against porn on Glass. Porn has taken over many other mediums on the Internet, despite efforts to fight against it. Tumblr is notorious for porn and Instagram has its own shadowy porn subculture. Google can threaten porn developers with bans of their Glassware developer licenses or other such penalties. But, as we have seen through the history of the Internet, porn finds a way.

New monopoly, same as the old monopoly?

Google's March Away From Open Standards

Google's deviations from open standards have been picking up pace lately. Each of Google's individual steps away from open standards are backed by good reasons, like Google's apparent desire not to defend in court its V8 open video codec and subsequent about-face on H.264. Or Google's shift away from Blink principles with Pepper and PNaCl.

But they represent a troubling trend.

For example, Google recently announced that it was deprecating its support for CalDav, an open standard, in favor of the Google Calendar API because "Most developers’ use cases are handled well by Google Calendar API." All your calendars are belong to us.

Perhaps more troubling, Google also cut its support for XMPP, the open messaging protocol, in an attempt to unify its messaging services. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Parker Higgins writes, such open standards support is critical for ensuring competition on user-facing functionality, rather than lock-in:

Google's earlier full support for XMPP meant that users could chat with people on other instant message services, or even who host their own chat servers. This kind of decentralization is a good thing: it decreases lock-in to any particular service, which in turn lets the services compete on important factors like quality, uptime, or respect for user privacy.

Ironically, Google calls out the importance of such open standards support in its own documentation for the now-deprecated Talk platform, as Higgins highlights: "[Service choice] allows you to choose your service provider based on other more important factors, such as features, quality of service, and price, while still being able to talk to anyone you want."

Of course, there are very good reasons for what Google is doing. As The Verge writes on Google's move away from XMPP, Google's messaging strategy was a mess of different protocols. It needed to simplify things and decided it was cleaner to craft a new standard rather than try to improve an old one. And as Neal Gompa points out, improving the old standard might still annoy users because it would likely create new incompatibilities.

Even so, Bryan Appleyard suggests that Google displays "a sinister impatience with government," generally. In the case of its move away from some key open standards, I suspect it's less a matter of any overt willingness to "be evil" and more with a desire to rid itself of the messiness of committees and consensus that open standards require.

Android All Over Again?

Not that this is particularly new. Google has taken plenty of heat for making Android's code open source without making its development process permeable to outside developers. Doing so, after all, would keep Google from being able to build what it wants, on its terms and schedule.

Stung by the criticism, particularly from Apple's Steve Jobs, then-Android chief Andy Rubin tweeted that availability of the source code was the true definition of open:

the definition of open: "mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make"

— Andy Rubin (@Arubin) October 19, 2010

Developer luminary Joe Hewitt ripped into Rubin's defense, but it ultimately it didn't seem to matter. Android kept chugging away, open or no, with device manufacturers happy to crank out low-cost competitors to Apple's iPhone and consumers happy to buy them.

Does Anyone Care?

Consumers don't seem to mind, clicking on an ever-increasing number of Google ads, served up against closed services. Convenience, unfortunately, often trumps all other considerations. 

Like Apple before it, Google clearly wants to create an optimal user experience, even at the expense of proprietary protocols. The problem, just like with Microsoft and Apple before it, is that by embracing closed standards Google threatens to throttle innovation, limiting consumers' upgrade path to the same vendor, year after year. Hopefully we'll be wiser this time, and demand open standards from the company that has generally been so committed to them.

Wishful thinking?

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

While not condoning the use of fully driverless cars, the DOT issued a non-binding policy statement to states, advising them to use driverless cars for testing only. The DOT also stressed that some forms of autonomy in vehicles can save lives, like speed adjustment, lane-centering and driver monitoring to watch for dangers like falling asleep at the wheel. 

As it stands, driverless cars are not fully legal, but they're also not illegal. It depends on the state, the level of autonomy in question and the various regulatory layers that stretch from a state-enforced law to a Federal one. 

The Legislative Puzzle Behind Driverless Cars

First of all, the decision of whether to allow driverless cars on the road is not up to the Federal government. States have the power to set driving laws, like the age requirement for a driver's license and the range of penalties for driving while talking on your cellphone. 

Because of this state power, California, Nevada and Florida have all legalized the use of fully autonomous cars in the last two years. It's those laws that make it legal for Google employees to cruise down to Mountain View without their hands on the wheel. In the case of Nevada, driverless vehicles are specifically licensed one-by-one by the state with a special license plate and a requirement that at least two people, one in the driver's seat, be in the car at all times. 

That's not to say that a company like Google couldn't test a driverless car in another state. New York, for instance, does not have any laws on the books that say using a driverless car is explicitly illegal, though it wouldn't be smart to take an autonomous Prius to the streets of Brooklyn, considering the liabilities involved if a crash occurs. In fact, for every other state in the U.S., driverless cars are not technically illegal because no law says cars must have drivers.

So where does the Federal government fit in? The DOT, which oversees the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) agency that issued the policy statement Friday morning, is the governmental body that manages a number of regulations, like vehicle safety and fuel economy standards, that currently keep companies like Toyota and Ford from selling a street-legal consumer model of an autonomous car. 

But while a fully driverless car is technically not available to consumers right now, different levels of autonomy are present in every modern vehicle and exist solely because of regulatory loopholes that don't take into account the vast levels of sophistication humming under the hoods of many software-equipped cars. Some of these technologies include adaptive cruise-control, which automatically alters speed depending on your proximity to other vehicles and lane-assist systems that, while not physically moving the car for you, alert drivers and suggest ways to drive safer. And future models of Mercedes-Benz vehicles will include auto-braking systems to prevent potential collisions. 

Given these advancements and the occasionally anachronistic laws on the books that date back to the time of horse-drawn carriages, the NHTSA policy statement was a two-fold move. It both publicly recognized government regulations are being far outpaced by technological advancements, but also acknowledged the government is willing to take it step by step to ensure that the ultimate goal - to increase driver safety and efficiency - is met within reasonable limits. 

The final verdict: “Self-driving vehicle technology is not yet at the stage of sophistication or demonstrated safety capability that it should be authorized for use by members of the public for general driving purposes,” the statement read. Also included were recommendations that states begin drafting up special licenses and carmakers consider the easiest way to implement and place a feature that would quickly switch from an autonomous to driver-control mode. 

The Pace Of Autonomous Advancement 

The commonly repeated timetable for driverless cars to hit the market is within the next decade, which poses a siginficiant legal hurdle for lawmakers and car manufacturers alike. While Google may be covering all the bases required to convince people a driverless car is safe - including its significant lobbying efforts to get laws on the books like it did in Nevada - it doesn't mean that the DOT will easily wave the green flag for Ford, Toyota, GM and the handful of other companies who are currently developing autonomous technology for their product lines. 

Without a significant joint effort from states, technology companies, carmakers and Federal legislative bodies, the future of autonomous cars will remain cloudy. All of the confusing layers of bureaucracy and the technology vs. government back-and-forths seem to hide a central question: driverless may be safer, but does the public really want to adopt them? 

According to a recent Cisco report on the consumer experience within the automotive industry, the answer is yes, mostly. 57% of global consumers trust driverless cars, the report cites. The trust is heavily weighted in emerging markets like Brazil, India, and China, but still comes in at 60% for the U.S. 

So it seems that Google and others have done a solid job convincing people that a driverless car is a good idea - after all, only two recorded crashes of the Google Prius included one where a driver was manually controlling it and another where the vehicle was rear-ended by another driver. With the Federal government keeping a watchful, but encouraging eye, on the market, regular drivers can only sit and wait for the laws to match the technology, presumably in traffic while Larry Page chides us for not using our time efficiently. 

Image courtesy of Flickr user jurvetson. 

Samsung had already announced a Nexus version of its Galaxy S4 at the Google I/O developer conference earlier this month. The Nexus HTC One will be available on June 26 for $599 through the Google Play store.

Google Glass could be that next big thing. If you are a smart mobile developer, you should at least be learning the rudiments of how to build apps for it now, before the rest of the world catches up to you. 

In 2008, the world of mobile apps was nascent. The Apple App Store was brand new and the Android Market (now Google Play) was still in development. Companies, developers and entrepreneurs that recognized the power of these mobile platforms early have done particularly well in the intervening years. Companies like RunKeeper were some of the first to the App Store and have built robust apps and business models out of that early advantage. 

You want to bet that Google Glass will not be among the next set of platforms that redefines the industry? You can. Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has his doubts. So do I. But, you don’t want to be walking down the street in five to ten years, seeing everybody with their Google Glasses and saying, “if only I had jumped on that when it was still new.”

Glassware (as Google Glass apps are known) is actually fairly easy to learn how to build. It is not all that different from building an Android app, just with a few different set of application programming interfaces (API) and a result that is similar to an Android Packet File (APK), just like if you were building for a smartphone. If you really want, you can actually port your existing Android app APK to run on Glass (but it would work better if you built straight for Glass and didn't port).

The Basics: Mirror API, Java, Python & Glassware

There are a couple basic things to know about developing Glassware. First, Glass apps can be built in either the Java or Python programming languages. Google has set up App Engine Software Development Kits (SDKs) for each language. You can develop Glassware in the Maven or Eclipse integrated developer environments (IDEs).

The next thing to do is set up the Mirror API that is the primary connection to Glassware. From here you build Timeline Cards, which is the user interface for your Glass app. The Card user interface can be tested within the Google Glass Playground testing environment. Once you have a working Card, you can deploy to Glass and be the talk of the party.

We have broken down just about everything you need to know to build for Glass here. Remember that you can also root Glass (but do so at your own risk as it will void your warranty).

If you are looking for a quick guide to how to get started with Glass development, check out the graphic below, produced by Boston-based mobile cloud services company Kinvey.

Are you going to build for Glass? Let us know in the comments. 

Top image: ReadWrite managing editor Fred Paul tries on Glass at Google I/O 2013 by Dan Rowinski

Speaking today at the D11 conference in Los Angeles, Woodside teased that he had the phone in his pocket, "but I can't show it to you," and that the Android smartphone would be built in a plant near Fort Worth, Texas, fomerly used by Nokia. Woodside said the X Phone will launch "by October" along with a handful of other new Motorola smartphones.

(See Also: 4 Ways Motorola X and Sony's Xperia Z Can Still Win)

Designed to compete with high-end offerings from Apple and Samsung, Moto X will feature an organic LED display, thinner and lighter than older LCD displays, and be packed with sensors used to help the device "know what you want to do before you do," Woodside said. For example, the phone will be able to tell when it's in your pocket, in your hand, or inside of a fast-moving car, and subsequently trigger appropriate user interactions.

Woodside also mentioned that the device will be the first smartphone built in the United States, with some 70 percent of manufacturing taking place at the Texas facility. 

Image via Motorola

Think again.

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers analyst Mary Meeker’s infamous Internet Trends report dropped today at the AllThingsD D11 conference in Los Angeles. Guess what? Mobile traffic still only makes up 15% of all worldwide Internet traffic. That is less than one-sixth of all time spent on the Internet. 

That means there is still plenty of work to be done and a lot of winners and losers to be determined.

We are currently in Year 6 of the Mobile Revolution (if we date the start of mass smartphone acceptance to the release of the original iPhone in July 2007). According to Meeker’s report, there are 1.5 billion smartphones users in the world, or about a 21% penetration rate of mobile users. Compared to the nearly 5 billion global cellphone users, smartphones still have a long road to climb. Believe it or not, in the big picture, smartphones are still in the early stages of adoption.

The Early Stages Of Mobile Adoption

If we start to break down the geographic demographics, some familiar trends emerge. For instance, the U.S. has one of the highest smartphone penetration rates in the world: 219 million smartphone users, 58% of the consumer public. China, too, has a huge smartphone subscriber base, far and away the highest volume in the world at 354 subscribers (yet just 29% of total consumer base). Japan has the highest smartphone penetration rate: 76% with 94 million users. 

Then the's the middle ground of countries that have begun adopting smartphones but have not quite reached critical mass. France is at 46% of total mobile subscribers and Germany only 29%. Italy is at 23% and Spain 33%. We tend to think of Western Europe as resembling the United States in its technological preferences, but the Mobile Revolution has clearly not spread as far and fast as we might think. 

Other parts of the world hold even more potential: With 67 million smartphone users, India is only at a 6% subscription rate. Indonesia is at 11% while Russia and Mexico are only in the teens, at 12% and 19%, respectively. 

What's Next For Mobile?

Obviously there is exceptional potential for continued mobile growth. Google is leading the charge, focusing on extending its Android operating system (and through it, Google services) to as many countries as possible. Since its first smartphone in 2008, Android has seen 900 million activations. Google has expanded its Google Play Android app and content store to 134 countries worldwide and is focused on bringing the mobile Internet to Africa and Asia by building out cellular infrastructure in those regions. 

Apple has fared very well in China, with the company posting its highest iPhone growth rates in the country for several quarters. 

If there is really a remaining battle in the Smartphone Wars, it has less to do with Apple vs. Google vs. Microsoft vs. BlackBerry and more to do with the race to connect the rest of the world to the Internet through mobile. The company that can best figure out how to solve that diverse and complex global problem will be in a great position to succeed for the decade to come.

But here's another thing to remember: All of mobile's growth lines point straight up. As more and more of the world scrambles to connect through mobile devices, there could be a place for nearly everybody to succeed in the mobile marketplace. 

Top image: Samsung Galaxy S4

What gives?

On the one hand, some of this disparity just comes down to hope. It's easy for investors to pummel Facebook and Google for not mixing a magical mobile advertising elixir, especially when such companies are struggling to increase mobile revenues without cutting too deeply into their desktop advertising revenues. Hence, as Benjamin Schachter, an analyst at Macquarie Securities, told Businessweek, "The battle for [Facebook] is: Mobile’s growing fast, desktop is slowing. Is mobile’s growth enough to make up for the declines in desktop? That’s clearly the key issue." 

Sure. But why isn't this an issue in the private markets?

For public companies like Facebook and Google, analysts like Richard Greenfield of BTIG Research ask: “How many mobile ads can you put into the mobile News Feed before you start to irritate users?" They recognize mobile will be big, but getting to big revenues is a delicate balancing act.

In the private markets, there doesn't seem to be the same level of concern. As I've written recently, the primary drive seems to be to generate lots of adoption, with little thought for revenue. Mobile is still Wild West enough that adoption is enough to generate outsized valuations. It's easier to make a lot of money on a company sale than it is to make lots of money through product or services sales. 

And no, it's not just because 98% of investors are dumb.

Meanwhile, in the real world, companies like Google are starting to make real money in mobile. Despite concerns that Google was poorly monetizing mobile search and click-through rates were Lilliputian, last quarter Google's mobile advertising business started to hum. This despite the fees it must pay Apple for search-related ads on iOS devices (as much as 25% of Google's mobile advertising revenue), the lower click-through rates on mobile (roughly half those of desktop) and threats from app-based searches.

But maybe this simply reflects a market in so much flux that no one really knows how to value it, or even who is winning. As analyst firm IDC notes:

Marketers spent $2.8 billion in 2012 on mobile search ads, compared with $1.6 billion in 2011 and $0.7 billion in 2010. Growth rates have slowed significantly, down from 195% in 2010 to 127% in 2011 to 68% in 2012. Google still dominates the market with gross revenue of $2,166 million, and a gross market share of 79%...

Mobile ad networks are losing market share to publishers [like Facebook and Pandora], and we expect them to lose even more going forward. Networks, especially independent ones, are entering a difficult phase, in which, with an ever smaller share of revenue, they'll have to compete with publishers, which will only grow in strength.

In other words, the market is big, but it's slowing down in some areas, picking up in others, and no one really knows who is going to win.

As such, paying $1 billion for Instagram in the hope that lots of pictures will turn into lots of revenue may actually be a sane strategy. At least, it may in the face of so much uncertainty about other areas of the mobile market, particularly shifting trends in mobile advertising. In sum, perhaps valuations on mobile businesses are so incongruous because there simply isn't yet a good baseline to determine what success looks like in mobile.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

LG, which made the Nexus 4 flagship for Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, was rumored to be the manufacturer of the follow up "Nexus 5." Apaprently, that will not be the case. Speaking to Dutch technology publication, All About Phones, LG's VP of mobile in Europe, Won Kim, said, "The Nexus 4 was a great success despite the production problems for us and Google. However we do not need such a marketing success again."*

The LG Nexus 4 was plagued by production delays after being released in the fall of 2012 with many customers not receiving their devices until months after ordering. The budget-friendly ($299 for 8 GB version through Google Play) Nexus 4 met high demand for both its consumer-friendly price and top-of-the-line specs. 

Kim also said that LG has no plans on releasing a Nexus-branded version of its current flagship smartphone, the Optimus G Pro. Samsung and Google announced a Nexus version of the Galaxy S4 that will hit the market later this summer featuring "stock" Android and not Samsung's TouchWiz skin overlay. HTC is also rumored to be making a Nexus version of its critically acclaimed One smartphone, rumored to be release this summer.

LG announced today that it would produce a white version of the Nexus 4, available first in Hong Kong before shipping to the rest of the world. 

*Translated from original Dutch via Google Translate.