Weekly Wrap-up: Does the Android Brand Make You Think of Google?

The Android Marketplace is rebranded as Google Play. All of this and more in the ReadWriteWeb Weekly Wrap-up.

After the jump you’ll find more of this week’s top news stories on some of the key topics that are shaping the Web – Location, App Stores and Real-Time Web – plus highlights from some of our six channels. Read on for more.

For Google, to Play Is to Fight the Commoditization of Android

When you think of Android, do you think of Google? No, probably not. Android as a brand conjures up associations with the little green robot, the sound of your phone’s Droid tone, Motorola, Samsung and even Verizon, but rarely Google. For that reason, Google has rebranded the Android Marketplace as Google Play. Is it too little too late or is it a smart move to lessen brand dilution? Dan Rowinski takes a look at the reasons for the rebrand and its hope for success in this week’s top story, For Google, to Play Is to Fight the Commoditization of Android.

From our readers:

Jay Godse – Android is not a strong enough brand to do what it needs to do for Google. It is valuable to developers as a technology brand. It is valuable to handset makers and carriers as a customer attraction brand. It is valuable to consumers as a place to buy apps for Android phones,i.e. a commerce brand.

In the long run, Android cannot be all three things. The weakest brand facet of Android is the commerce brand, so it is a good decision to separate it from the technology and customer attraction brands in the form of Google Play.

Personally, I don’t think that the name “Google Play” captures the right value proposition to customers of the Android marketplace. “Google Market” might have been a better choice. However, at least the brand is separate from the technology and customer-attraction brand facets of Android.

More Top Posts:

Google’s Go Programming Language Grows Up: Now What?

Does the world really need another C-ish programming language? Apparently Google thought so in 2009, when it channeled the Ramones and introduced Go. Now the Go team has reached a stable point they’re calling Go 1 and sending it out into the world for “creating reliable products, projects and publications.” Now, what’s the world going to do with it? More

I Quit Path

There are too many apps. “There’s an app for that” has passed the point of cliché and become some strange kind of axiom. Path is the perfect example. We have an app for staying in touch with friends: Facebook. We have an app for sharing pretty photos: Instagram. We have an app for checking into places: Foursquare. We have approximately 9,182 apps for auto-tweeting what song we’re listening to right now. And yet, Path. More

5 Apps for Working From the iPad

Let’s be real about this. You can’t do everything on an iPad. As Shawn Blanc pointed out the other day, you can’t make iOS apps on it, for example. But you might be surprised by how much real work you can do on it with the right tools. If your work requires generally office-like capabilities, there are definitely iPad solutions. More

10 AirPlay-Ready iPad Apps That Make Apple TV Worth It

When I first unboxed the new 1080p Apple TV and plugged it in, I wasn’t blown away. Having used a Boxee Box for the last 16 months, I’ve come to expect flexibility and a broad selection of content sources from my streaming set-top boxes. In fact, after several minutes of playing around with it, I was tempted to box it back up and send it back. More

The Unspoken Etiquette of Facebook Photo Tagging

That afternoon, the Facebook notifications just kept rolling in, one after the other. You’ve been tagged in a photo, the social giant eagerly announced via email, again and again. The subject of many of those photographs – we’ll call her Stacey, as she has requested anonymity – was not expecting these images to be published online, to say the least. More

The End of RIM As We Know It

BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion shares are down tonight after reporting a terrible quarter: Sales are shrinking at a time when its main competitor, Apple, saw iPhone sales more than double. RIM is no longer profitable. And now it is looking for a new plan. More

Google Is Now a Graphing Calculator

Google has decided to make its simple search box into yet another thing. It’s now a WebGL-powered 3D graphing calculator. If you type in a two-variable function, Google’s search box on the desktop will graph an animated, interactive, 3D plot right in your browser. More

New Ways to Do Disaster Recovery Using Virtualization

Remember your father’s disaster recovery (DR) process? Chances are it involved using a bunch of data tapes and rotating them between home and work, or different offices. Tapes were cheap, but notoriously unreliable. And getting them restored on a server took a lot of work. There are better solutions for today’s DR, including using one of a number of newer virtualization technologies that makes it easier and a lot faster to bring up a server from a backup. Let’s look at some of the alternatives. More

How to Jailbreak According to chpwn

When you jailbreak an iOS device for the first time, you have a lot to learn. That’s just the first of many ways jailbreaking is unlike the out-of-the-box Apple experience. To get a better sense of the purpose and potential of jailbreaking, I talked to one of the best. More

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