It’s clear that Google had other things it could have talked about on the first day of the I/O conference. Like Google Glass. Instead, the attendees heard more about how Google has developed new ways to turn data into services. The highlights were not some fancy hardware but the magic of Google’s APIs and algorithms, the bread and butter of what Google does. I spent part of the afternoon talking with Rackspace’s Robert Scoble and long-time media pro Jake Ludington about the event, which had little of the raw excitement of years past when executives talked breathlessly about Google+ or parachuted on to the top of Moscone to show off Google Glass. I first met Scoble and Ludington in 2004. Scoble worked at Microsoft and Ludington was a big part of Gnomedex, one of the geekiest conferences of the day. Blogs were arguably the most advanced social networks, mobile phones were still like bricks. My conversation with Scoble focused on the semantics, the context of the algorithms and the more nitty-gritty aspects of a keynote really meant for developers. Robert Scoble at Google I/O Ludington looked for the points in the keynote when the audience seemed most engaged. Jake Ludington at Google I/O Both Scoble and Ludington are geeks in their own way. It is the way that data can be one thing and then another that draws them to Google I/O. It’s not too much different today. In 2004 it was about using RSS feeds to read blogs. Today, Google Glass is like a reader, pulling in data to a lens that transmits ir for the human mind to read. Again, it’s a new way to turn data into services. Scoble and Ludington show that the spectacle of something like a sky diver may be fun but it’s the wonder of innovation that keeps us coming back.
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Google I/O, the company’s sixth annual developer conference, got officially underway in San Francisco on Wednesday, and it was an eventful day. It took the company every minute of its epic three-hour keynote to unfurl a laundry list of announcements and updates, seemingly across every product category in its arsenal — from Android, Chrome and Search to Maps, Google+ and Hangouts — each with a fresh coat of paint. We even saw the arrival of Google’s very own subscription music service, today, which is already being touted as a potential Spotify killer. Amidst Larry Page’s triumphant return to the stage (after addressing his much-discussed vocal issues yesterday), Google’s soaring stock price and sexy smartphone demos, it was easy to miss an important announcement concerning Google’s foray into a considerably less sexy market: Education. (And K-12 education, no less.) Android Engineering Director Chris Yerga took the stage to introduce Google Play for Education, through which Google hopes to extend Play — its application and content marketplace for Android — into the classroom. The new store, which is scheduled to launch this fall, aims to simplify the content discovery process for schools, giving teachers and students access to the same tools that are now native to the Google Play experience. Teachers will now be able to search for and recommend learning content by category, grade level, and a variety of other criteria, and will have the opportunity to discover content recommended by other educators, for example. What’s more, every piece of content served within its curated portal is pre-approved by educators before being posted, so that teachers can rest easy knowing the recommended content is quality and school-appropriate. Google has already begun to recruit content partners, with NASA and PBS among those that have already signed on to make their content available to users when the store goes live this fall. Yerga said that the team plans to begin accepting content submissions from developers at some point this summer. Today, Apple is far and away the de facto leader in the education space, but with its new educational app marketplace, Google is clearly positioning itself such that it can begin to make a real play at challenging that dominance. To that point, the real key to Google’s new product is the fact that it enables administrators to distribute applications to their entire team. If a teacher wants to shoot content to a couple hundred Android devices, they simply have to type in their group’s name and voila, Google will push that sucker out to everyone on the list. Another important perk for cash-strapped teachers is that the marketplace doesn’t require them to use credit cards to purchase content. Instead, educators have the option to buy apps and content in bulk and charge those purchases to their account. These are important features for educational users, removing a great deal of the friction around acquiring learning content. Not only that, but, while schools and educators are eager to bring apps and other digital learning tools into their classrooms, it’s critical for them to be able to manage and to bring some oversight to the content distribution process. Plus, the Android Marketplace, er, Google Play, has had a long-standing malware problem, so that extra layer of teacher control can help get schools over the hump. While the penetration of Apple’s mobile devices into education is significant, when it comes to other hardware, IT departments don’t want to deal with the hassle of networking iDevices. Plus, Apple products are expensive — and especially for bulk orders, schools will want to turn elsewhere. Where Google can have a real advantage over Apple is in its ability to combine Google Play for Education with Google Appls for Ed. Small businesses have been adopting Google’s productivity software in droves, and the interest has started to grow among school boards who want to introduce tablets into their classrooms and use Google Apps as the standard. Together these two products can work hand in hand in the classroom, with each becoming more powerful as a result. In turn this could help create the incentive or leverage that it needs to begin attracting new users. The biggest takeaway: If it weren’t already abundantly clear, Google is no longer just a search company. The company has been exerting tremendous effort to achieve a unification among its products, not only in terms of design, but in the way its products interact with each other. That is best demonstrated by the fact that Google products now touch just about everyone. In a sense, Google is becoming a utility provider — for both consumers and developers — and, in turn, a data company. While Apple has long been focused most of its attention on design over the years, Google’s focus on utility has allowed it to build a massive infrastructure, collecting data from across a broad range of software products at a nearly unprecedented scale. For me, there’s no better testament to the utility and wide application of Google’s infrastructure than Education. Naturally, in juxtaposition with sexy new smartphones and mobile technology, streaming music services and re-imagined social networks, Google’s work in Education tends to end up in the backseat. But, for this reason, Google has quietly (and quickly) gained noticeable traction in Education, thanks to the adaptation of its utilities and gadgets, like Google Apps and Chromebooks, to the learning market. For example, in February, Google announced in February that Chromebooks are now in over 2,000 schools across the U.S. For awhile now, Apple has grabbed most of the attention in the education space thanks to the rapid adoption of iPads among schools and teachers. Furthermore, when we talk about Google having positioned itself as a provider of essential utilities, there’s probably no better than the company’s recent announcement that the entire country of Malaysia — that’s 10 million students, teachers and parents — will use Google Apps for Education as part of the country’s effort to improve its education system. Through its Google Apps products, Google allows students and teachers to collaborate in realtime through Web apps, while using already-familiar tools like Google search and Gmail. The other part of this is, Google’s cloud, its infrastructure, allows it to operate its software products at scale without the traditionally high costs. For that reason, the company can make its educational products accessible to cash-strapped IT departments, for example. With infrastructure that allows it to run its software at scale from the cloud, Google’s products become more flexible. That foundation behind it, with Google Apps having found penetration among small businesses, it adapted the suite to address similar productivity and collaboration inefficiencies in education. Apply that to Google Play and pair it with Google Apps, and you can start to see why EdTech entrepreneurs and investors, when asked what the biggest trends are in education (that no one’s talking about yet), more than a few have said “start paying attention to Google.” And with the impending arrival of Google Play for Education, if Google can start to get Android tablets into the hands of kids, it looks like they might just be onto something… Google Developer page here.
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The Liberator’s 3D-printed parts By now, you have probably heard about the Liberator, a 3D printed plastic gun designed, assembled, and test-fired by Cody Wilson of Defense Distributed. Is it legal? Last week, the State Department’s arms export office demanded that Defense Distributed remove CAD files for the Liberator from its website. Defense Distributed complied with the takedown letter right away, despite strong language on its website promising it would be “a home for fugitive information” and “No object file will be censored unless it is malicious software.” Predictably, it didn’t take long for the CAD files to make their way to BitTorrent, where they’ll be available forever. Angle 1: Arms Control It’s worth reading the letter from the State Department, which is only two and a half pages long. In a nutshell, the letter demands the takedown while it decides whether publishing firearms-related CAD files online violates ITAR. ITAR, which stands for the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, are rules that the State Department promulgated under the Arms Export Control Act. One part of ITAR is the United States Munitions List, which is a master list of products and technologies that can’t be exported without prior government approval under a licensing system. Because Defense Distributed didn’t seek an export license, there’s a problem. Are CAD files munitions? The State Department believes the Liberator files fall under the Category I of the US Munitions List, which covers firearms and related “technical data.” Section 120.10 of ITAR says “technical data” includes “blueprints, drawings, photographs, plans, instructions or documentation” about “the design, development, production, manufacture, assembly, operation, repair, testing, maintenance or modification of defense articles” — so that appears to cover CAD files for guns. Unsurprisingly, Defense Distributed is already saying (melodramatically) that it will fight the takedown demand: “It seems we may have to have our rights declared in court to simply keep developing gun files to put into the public domain. DD’s right to exist is being challenged.” What will probably happen next is that Defense Distributed will apply for an export license, which the State Department will deny, and Defense Distributed will sue to get a judge to issue an order that the State Department can’t block it — and that is where things will get interesting. Angle 2: Gun Control Laws Because the Liberator is made mostly of plastic, Defense Distributed also has to contend with the Undetectable Firearms Act. This law, first passed in 1988 and renewed in 2003, makes it illegal to “manufacture, import, sell, ship, deliver, possess, transfer, or receive” any firearm that can’t be detected by x-ray machines. Gunsmiths with a federal firearms license (Wilson has one) can build guns to test them for compliance, but other than that, undetectable guns are completely contraband. Wilson packaged the CAD files with detailed instructions, including an admonition to DIYers to include a block of metal in a hole specifically included in the design for that purpose. It’s up to the person doing the printing to comply, though. If you don’t put the metal block in, you could be in big trouble. It is probably just a matter of days until the ATF or FBI start knocking on the doors of people who’ve already started posting pictures of their 3D printed guns online. Notably, the Undetectable Firearms Act bans the atoms, but not the bits: you can possess CAD files for an undetectable firearm without violating it. That’s an easy legislative patch, but it will  run into free speech problems. Angle 3: First Amendment Meets Second Amendment I predict the Constitutional wrangling will focus on the First Amendment, not the Second. (For foreign readers, the First Amendment to the US Constitution provides extremely strong protections for citizens’ freedom of speech, and the Second Amendment provides a right “to keep and bear arms” — although the language is a mess and reasonable people disagree on how to interpret it.) This is going to spawn some strange bedfellows: I would not be surprised to see the NRA and ACLU on the same side in this fight. Why is this a First Amendment case? One of the issues is whether the government can prevent citizens from publishing gun blueprints. A big gateway question, though, is how to characterize Defense Distributed’s CAD files in the first place. Is a CAD file expressive speech that should be protected, or a functional thing that should be regulated? This distinction is important because the government has tremendous power to regulate things, but far less power to regulate speech. When courts first started to come to grips with software, they came out on the side of protecting it as speech despite its functional aspects, but they might view 3D printing files differently because when you “run” them, you get things. President Clinton’s Executive Order No. 13026 relaxing the crypto ban (more on that below) recognized the speech–functionality distinction: Because the export of encryption software, like the export of other encryption products described in this section, must be controlled because of such software’s functional capacity, rather than because of any possible informational value of such software… In addition to the CAD files themselves, there is also Wilson’s act of publishing them. Is the act of publishing a functional gun blueprint speech? Two Supreme Court free speech cases give a partial roadmap. The first is United States v. O’Brien, in which the Supreme Court upheld a criminal conviction for burning a draft card. The Court found the defendant’s conduct was expressive, but still upheld his conviction because the law under which he was prosecuted — a prohibition on destroying draft cards — had justifiable military purposes that outweighed his free speech right. One could see courts today taking a similar path by finding that the government’s interest in controlling the flow of firearms and military information outweighs Defense Distributed’s right to publish gun design files. The other is the Pentagon Papers case, New York Times v. United States. There, the New York Times sought to publish damning internal Pentagon documents about the Vietnam War. Even though the material was directly related to national security, the Court allowed the New York Times to go forward, finding the newspaper’s speech interest was greater than the government’s interest in preserving the confidentiality of classified information. The case helps Defense Distributed to the extent it struck down a prior restraint on speech, but publishing proof-of-concept plastic pistol blueprints is not in the same league as exposing government misconduct. The Crypto Cases This isn’t the first time courts have had to sort out the mess when innovation hurtled into arms control law and the First Amendment. The US Munitions List used to cover a wide range of cryptography software, a restriction only relaxed in 1996 by an Executive Order by President Clinton — who, even then, perhaps, realized the futility of censoring the spread of code. Before that, though, PGP creator Phil Zimmerman was criminally investigated, but never charged, for violating ITAR. The issue made its way to the courts in 1997 in Bernstein v. US Department of State, where Daniel Bernstein, a UC Berkeley computer science researcher, sued to be allowed to publish his cryptography research, which included working code. Judge Marilyn Hall Patel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California found that it was unconstitutional for the government to prevent Bernstein from publishing his crypto software. Judge Patel held that blocking Bernstein’s publication amounted to a prior restraint on his speech that violated the First Amendment. Defense Distributed will likely follow Bernstein’s path. The State Department’s takedown demand probably qualifies as a prior restraint, to which courts are incredibly hostile. But the ability to download a file, press “Print,” and have gun parts come out could also tip some judges toward calling gun CAD files functional things and allowing the government to regulate them. Just Because You Can Doesn’t Mean You Should There’s more to this than law, however. There is also ethics and common sense. Even if you can publish 3D-printable gun blueprints, should you? What are the consequences of doing it? Nobody in the 3D printing industry is going to thank Wilson for bringing heat from the State Department and Congress. Wilson’s stunt could well lead to new restrictions and regulations on the nascent digital manufacturing industry, even before it has had a chance to figure things out for itself. (Scaremongers like these clowns won’t help either.) And for what? The Liberator isn’t about to liberate anybody — it will probably melt or explode after one or two shots. Given the Bernstein case, even if he wins, Wilson may not even be breaking any new legal ground.
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Sebastian Rodriguez waited in line 90 minutes to be the first person at Google I/O to get the Google Chromebook Pixel, the premium laptop given to all conference attendees today. Rodriguez is a a software engineer with Thales, a data security company. He humored us and did an “unboxing” of his new  Pixel. He was hoping to get Google Glass as were most of the people we talked to at the event but he said the Pixel will be fine around the house. We caught up with a few other people today at the Moscone Center who were happily walking out with their new machines. One woman plans to give the Pixel to her six-year-old daughter. A man from the Philippines said he was hoping for an Android. Another attendee said he wants to use the Pixel  to develop apps. Nonetheless, these attendees are pretty lucky to get such a sleek machine. Here’s Frederic Lardinois’ review from earlier this year.
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Today’s three-hour-long marathon I/O keynote came with plenty of announcements, but mostly we were assured that Google is focused on building frameworks that developers and consumers can both benefit from. We saw a lot of what we expected, a more unified company, one that needed three hours in one session to get their message across. Breaking today’s keynote up into two days would have disrupted the momentum coming out of a company that closed the day at an all-time high on the stock market. Key areas of the business saw updates, all re-laying the important foundation necessary to move Google forward over the next ten years. From search to maps, everything is getting a new coat of paint, a new polished experience and a focus from every team within the company. The only announcement that didn’t fit into a “category” was its new music subscription service. Some are calling it a Spotify-killer, but to us, it seemed like a necessary and inevitable announcement. Android The day started out with Android, with the news that over 48B apps have been installed from the Google Play store, thanks to 900M activations of Android devices. That’s great news for developers, showing that consumers really care. To make their apps better, Google introduced a new tool called the Android Studio, which makes developing in multiple languages and for multiple screen sizes easier than ever. The takeaway is that Android is massive, is giving Apple a run for its money and all developers should consider building apps on its platform first, rather than second. Chrome That little project that Google worked on, you know…the browser? It’s the number one browser in the world and Google isn’t afraid to tell you all about it. To the tune of 750M active users, Chrome is clearly becoming the number one choice of Internet browsers. Oh, it’s also a platform to build apps on top of, so developers should be doing that to. The takeaway is that if you’re building apps on the web, people love Chrome and Chrome offers all of the open tools you need to build gorgeous things. Google+ Whether you think that Google+ is a Facebook competitor or not, the 41 features introduced today will get your attention. The stream itself, which now has 190M monthly active users, is now three-columned and has interactive animations all over the place. Google says that the stream was flat, so it needed a fresh take. If you’re into taking photos, Google has finally integrated all of Nik’s professional photo suite goodies and will now auto-enhance your shots with something they call “Awesome.” Not a photographer, but chat with your friends a lot? GTalk, Talk, Google Chat or whatever you’ve been referring to it is gone. Hangouts is in, and it’s an app for iOS, Android and the desktop. It has video and text chats, complete with emoji and presence. We’re just glad that they didn’t call it Babel, which was the real internal name for the project. The takeaway here is that Google knows that you want to talk to your friends and family. It thinks if it can integrate features to facilitate in all of the places that you are, at your desk or on your phone or tablet, they have you covered. Search Search is getting smarter these days. Google knows that you go to its site whenever you can’t think of something, but it wants you to be able to ask it questions naturally. You can do that on Android and iOS with Google Now, but the company announced conversational search for the desktop today. Speaking of Google Now, you can get public transit information, as well as details on your favorites TV, books and video games. Knowledge Graph, which fires in little snippets of information when you perform a search, added some new languages and statistics. The takeaway here is that Google wants even more of your searches, but would rather you sit back and relax while performing them. There’s no need to think about how to get the best search result, simply ask a question naturally. Maps Getting the gist yet? Google is refreshing all the things to make them easier to use, develop for and discuss with your Mom and Dad. Speaking of Mom and Dad, they probably use Google Maps to get just about everywhere. Mobile Maps users will get a new experience come summer time, while the desktop experience got such a complete overhaul that they’ve only made it available in preview mode as to not give anyone a heart attack. Want to see it for yourself? Check out our hands on look. The takeaway here is that Google Maps has been a force for almost ten years. It was time to make them more user friendly, helping you discover new places and not just get from point A to point B. The rest Google’s CEO Larry Page made a triumphant return to the I/O stage, a day after discussing his much-discussed vocal issues. He even discussed a world where cool things could be built without the moonshotters being bothered. All in all, it was a solid day for Google, as its stock ended the day at an all-time high. There were even fighting robots. The future is bright for Google, the foundation for everything has been (re)laid out. Unification. We’ll be here for the rest of the week, hanging out with developers and listening to some roundtable discussions. If you want to watch the full keynote, have a gander here:
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Google isn’t about search, apps or devices. Those are just vehicles, and there’s no destination. That’s because Larry Page’s Google is on an unending pursuit of the future, not just next quarter’s earnings. The scattershot of projects Google revealed today at I/O had just one unifying factor: They further that pursuit, or empower the curiosity of others. Google is lucky. It takes a lot of fuel to shoot for the moon. Fuel that most tech companies don’t have or are unwilling to burn. But Google has ads that pay for everything the company does. The armies of employees, the seas of servers, and the laboratories for experimenting in both the digital and physical worlds. I talked to a Google Chrome engineer the other night. He described his job as almost academic. No one ever talks about money — how much things cost or how much they would make. His job is simply to let people access information as quickly and efficiently as possible. That’s the future, and a browser is just the by-product. Google didn’t launch its new on-demand subscription service Google Play Music All Access just because it wanted to get into music; Android is Google’s push to see the potential of our phones. Music is a fundamental companion to being on the go, so why not let people listen to any song they want? All Access was just something Google had to do to see our lifestyles merge with mobile computing. Digital communication shouldn’t just be a degraded version of talking with someone in person. When we can share, emote and collaborate seamlessly no matter where we are or what device we’re on, brilliant things will happen. So out springs a new cross-platform messaging version of Hangouts. Google isn’t trying to desperately win market share and engagement with today’s big revamp of Google Maps, it’s just another step towards the future of navigation. Google also wants to accelerate other intrepid explorers chasing what’s next. Today it gave developers new cloud messaging capabilities, Android Studio for testing apps, extra location APIs, and an easy app translation service. It knows it can’t unlock the future by itself, so it lets others forge their own keys. Compare all this to the other tech giants who seem myopically focused on today’s wars for display ad and mobile hardware dollars. Apple and Samsung seem busy with another iteration of their latest smartphone, or linear innovation for watches and TVs. Even if Apple is secretly concocting wetware computers that go inside our bodies, it still seems to be in service of building “beautiful” products and making money. Facebook has its hands full with mobile with projects like Home, and Amazon is making TV shows. They all seem vulnerable. One or two flops away from fading. A crummy iPhone, a hip new social app, and suddenly the tides could turn. Meanwhile, Google has leapfrogged into the next decade. Search, maps, Android — they aren’t going anywhere. And with that foundation, Google is free to try, tinker and even fail. But even when it fails, it learns, and for Google, that’s the whole point.
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Google’s stock price came close to its 52-week high on the first day of Google I/O today, hitting $915 per share at close. In comparison, Apple today dropped 15 points to close at $428 per share, 277 points off its 52-week high. This morning, Google stock jumped to $909 per share from its opening price of $895 when Co-Founder Larry Page hit the stage at around 11:45. It is now trading at $916.50 in after-hours trading. One analyst I talked to attributed the increase to Google’s announcement of its “all access” streaming service and the rotation out of hardware makers such as Apple and HP. The difference between Google and Apple’s share price is a barometer of the tech landscape. Google is a data company. Apple is more about design, creating beautiful devices. The difference is evident here at Google I/O. Google has built its infrastructure to manage more data than arguably any company in the world. It uses ths data to provide services that it highlighted today in its keynote. This includes its Google Translate APIs and the next generation of its Google Maps. The iPhone will always be elegant. As my colleague Josh Constine points out, the beauty of a device is just not as important, as the entire world becomes a fabric of data objects.
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Google took the lid off of its new version of Maps at I/O 2013 today, which is a dramatic redesign of the long-standing navigation and place-finding software across all platforms. We got a chance to go hands-on with the new Maps, which is still a beta product, with access only given out to a few select users so far. In the video above, you check it out in action as a Google rep gives us a walkthrough. The new Google Maps takes a bunch of stuff that Google has been working on from Knowledge Graph to make, as it put it during the keynote, billions of apps for billions of people. That means you get a lot more personalization pulled into the experience, surfacing local landamrks that are likely important to you, as well as one-click directions from stored locations like your home address. Places frequented by your friends and acquaintances will also be pulled in to complete the picture. The whole experience on a Chromebook Pixel was fast, responsive and remarkably intuitive. All the new touch controls seem perfectly designed for use with the Pixel’s touchscreen display, and reduce dramatically the number of steps required to do things like call up directions. The in-building panoramas and 360-degree images are very impressive, and truly do give you a sense of both the inside and outside of a location, but don’t expect the images to be all that comprehensive for most locations at launch. Overall this looks like an awesome improvement to the Maps experience, and it’s hard to see any spots where the progress isn’t a good thing. But it’s very different, so expect some pushback when Google does eventually push this live to a wider audience.
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Meet the PR2 personal robot from Willow Garage. The human-sized bot can learn to fold clothes and do other activities via voice commands, and it can even get into sword fights. Watch as I challenge the PR2 to a lightsabre duel today at Google I/O, and learn how Willow Garage could help anyone run their own experiments with robots. While it might look like the PR2 is just for fun and games, it’s actually designed for universities. Willow Garage sells the PR2 to schools and provides the ROSS open-sourced operating system for controlling it. This way PhD students don’t have to waste time building a crummy robot of their own, and instead can run their experiments on a powerful, reliable learning machine. And seriously, this thing is powerful. It’s got two lasers, a 5-megapixel camera, and an Xbox Kinect for vision, two pairs of stereo cameras for depth perception, a telescoping spine and seven-degrees-of-freedom arms for movement, and wheels that can propel it at one meter per second. Willow Garage and the PR2 could democratize robotics and turn us all into tinkerers. Be sure to watch the video to see the PR2 cut me down like a true Sith Lord, as well as perform less evil operations.
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Google+ is getting a big update for its photos experience, which is rolling out to users now. Initial impressions show a work flow that makes it easier to tweak pictures quickly and even automatically, without requiring that you learn a huge amount about Photoshop or other editing software. It’s something that’s designed to be mostly a non-destructive, light-touch product by default, just tweaking things like vignetting, skin smoothing and color balance to make elements pop. If you do a lot of volume image editing, bringing in lots of photos and essentially running the same few tweaks on each, this could be a simple way to replace that with something better, especially since Google+ allows for full resolution uploads to its cloud-based image locker service. I’m so far pretty impressed with the Google+ image tweaking experience, particularly the Motion feature that stitches together images taken in quick succession to make GIFs. If you’ve ever dug into creating your own shareable GIFs, you probably know that it’s not as straightforward as it appears to be. Motion takes the hassle out of that, deliverying on a very specific need that could help fuel the next generation of BuzzFeed writers and Redditors. For Google, bringing an improved photos experience to Google+ is a way for it to compete with other social networks like Facebook and their media-focused add-ons like Instagram. It’s also going to be trouble for startups like Shoebox that are also looking into cloud photo organization and management. Will it help the social network from Google become more social? We’ll see.
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It’s becoming increasingly commonplace for startups in the so-called “sharing economy” to take heat from regulators who seek to hold them to the same business standards as incumbent businesses. The latest company to come under fire from regulators is peer-to-peer car-sharing startup RelayRides, which received a cease-and-desist notice from New York State’s Department of Financial Services (DFS). The DFS has charged RelayRides with “false advertising and violations of insurance law,” which it says could put the public at risk. Along with the cease and desist, the department has issued a “scam alert” due to intricacies in New York insurance law that could leave those who use car-sharing services like RelayRides liable in the case of an accident. In short, the DFS warns that the insurance from RelayRides’ provider Hudson Insurance Company may not cover damages that occur while a car is being rented through the service. Furthermore, participating in these types of car-sharing programs could be a violation of their existing policies and could result in the cancellation of their insurance. As a result, RelayRides has agreed to suspend new rentals in the state while it tries to work with the department on the issue. In a blog post, CEO Andre Haddad said the company would honor existing reservations in the meantime. The suspension of service was announced one day after the startup acquired San Francisco-based competitor Wheelz. That acquisition was meant to add some technology in the form or proprietary hardware that could be used to make car sharing more easily accessible. RelayRides isn’t the only “sharing economy” startup that has come under fire recently. The cease-and-desist against the car-sharing startup comes at the same time that ride-sharing startup SideCar is coming under regulatory scrutiny from local officials in Austin, Philadelphia and New York City. Airbnb also is being looked at more closely in major metropolitan cities like New York, where half of its rentals are deemed illegal.
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It’s rare to see a company that is so established yet as cutting-edge as Shapeways. The company, founded in 2007 as a spin-off of Royal Philips Electronics, began as a one-off 3D printing service that offered basic plastic items for sale online. Over the years, however, the company has branched off into some amazing materials – steel, ceramic, and even sandstone – and they’ve already been able to support full color printing in 3D. Now the company is opening a series of facilities in the US and they invited us to their first print shop in Long Island City, New York. In this massive, warehouse-like space, the company has set up a number of acrylic printers as well as a small customer service team. They plan on expanding further, adding more machines to an already impressive array. The goal is to offer 3D print shops close to major US metropolitan areas to reduce wait-times and to spread out the manufacturing process among different factories. The company will have 30 to 50 printers in the LIC location once it is complete. I spoke with co-founder Peter Weijmarshausen about the Shapeways process, the printers, and what it takes to become a 3D-printing powerhouse in a nascent market. It’s great to see such a cool company expand and it’s even more fun to get to tour the facilities even before the machines, printers, and staff becomes fully operational. Enjoy the tour and tune in next time for another TechCrunch Makers! TechCrunch Makers is a video series featuring people who make cool stuff. If you’d like to be featured, email us!.
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Apple had a bit of a head start when it came to mobile software sales, since it launched its App Store earlier than the Android Market — now called Google Play. The gap between the two, which was more pronounced in terms of initial downloads, has begun to close. Today both Play and the App Store announced very similar milestones. Apple has been counting down to its 50 billionth app download for a while now. In fact, the assets were leaked via the Apple website backend code earlier today, so we all knew it was coming. Coincidence that it would land on a Google keynote day? That’s hard to tell, but Google had its own milestone to announce: 48 billion downloads announced onstage at I/O today. The announcements give us a unique opportunity to compare download numbers from both stores on as equal footing as possible, and the result is a snapshot of two app stores that are neck and neck — at least in terms of straight downloads. That doesn’t take into account paid vs. free apps, or how much revenue each makes from ads and other sources. But as you can see from the graph, it marks one area at least where Google used to trail considerably but is now catching up. Also the fact that Google’s Android OS now accounts for a majority percentage of global smartphone sales means it shouldn’t be surprising that there are a lot of people downloading apps.
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Google today announced a small but cool update to Gmail. For emails where the developer has enabled this feature, Google will now show action buttons next to emails in your inbox that let you take actions without even opening the message. The cool thing about this, however, is that it’s open to developers, who can now use the schema.org markup language to add their own actions to Gmail messages. Google says developers could, for example, use this for confirmation emails when somebody registers to a site, or they could present magazine subscribers with a one-click action to renew their subscriptions or review a product, movies, restaurants or services. Developers could also use this to augment flight confirmation emails and allow users to respond to a meeting invitation right from the inbox without ever opening the email. Declaring these actions should be easy for developers who simply have to add a straightforward piece of code to their emails. More importantly, this makes emails more interactive than ever before. For the most part, email providers do not allow any code to run inside an HTML email. While Microsoft has experimented with whitelisting a few email senders and allowed them to run scripts inside the inbox, Google seems to be willing to open its system up to any developers. It’s important to note that the company has implemented a couple of security measures that should ensure that the user’s information remains safe. All actions, for example, have to be handled via HTTPS URLs, and hosts must have vaild SSL certificates. myERP, a popular all-in-one cloud-based business app for accounting, billing, project management and CRM, for example, has already implemented the buttons, and others will surely follow very soon.
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Time for a back-up plan for your Twitter back-up plan. Backupify — the cloud-based backup, search and restore provider for online services — is shutting down its TweetBackup service for Twitter users. The company has posted a note about the closure on its site, as well as — yes — on its Twitter account, noting that new signups are stopping as of today, and that existing users will have 30 days, until June 28, to keep logging into their accounts and back up their data. After 45 days, it notes, “we will begin purging the data from our Amazon servers.” On one of the two FAQ pages that Backupify has created to answer some questions about the service, it suggests a couple of alternatives to TweetBackup’s subscribers: for business users, they can opt for Backupify’s own-branded service; for consumers, it suggests going somewhere else altogether, Ditto from Norton Labs, owned by one of Backupify’s strategic investors, Symantec. We are reaching out to the company to find out more, but it looks like this is indeed part of a larger strategy at the company to reposition itself more closely on its enterprise services and away from lower cost/free consumer offerings. In fact, this may not be too new of an idea: “We always intended to have Tweetbackup users join Backupify’s base twitter service,” Backupify’s Jason Ellis notes. And in July 2012, when it announced the $9 million round in which Symantec invested, it noted that the free services (TweetBackup was one) were there mainly for lead-generation for paid apps. Backupify offers standalone products for Google Apps, Salesforce, and what it collectively refers to as “personal apps,” which include Facebook and Twitter. These it will backup free for a limited amount of data and then charge for more features and more storage space. (Prices for paid services range from $3/month/user for the most basic Google Apps backup through to $50/month for 10 licenses of 1GB each for Salesforce.) Given that Twitter has now made its own archiving service more widely available now, perhaps the writing was on the wall for whether Backupify would ever be able to translate this into a more profitable service without more investment. Meanwhile, other services like SocialSafe is now offering a free, six-month licenses to TweetBackup refugees.
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Flying under the radar amid a flurry of announcements coming out of the Google I/O developer conference this morning, is the bigger news of how Google is stepping up its efforts to compete with online payment giants like PayPal with a revamped checkout process for the web, mobile web, within mobile applications running on Android, and more. It’s a proposed death to PayPal by a thousand cuts, leveraging everything from Chrome to Android and even Gmail. What Google hasn’t quite worked out yet is how all this will tie together in the long run, but you can see the plan beginning to form. #1: Google Wallet On The Web: Storing Payment Credentials In Chrome Lets start with the browser, the de facto home for online shopping. It’s not news that the checkout experience is broken. Shopping cart abandonment is one of the biggest pain points for today’s merchants, mainly because their websites have traditionally offered only cumbersome and tedious forms for shoppers to fill out in order to make a purchase. As noted during today’s keynote, one of the hardest things you can do on the web is try to buy something. The process takes around 21 steps, the company explained. Of course, Google is exaggerating here a bit – billing and shipping details are usually the same, but Google counted each field (street, zip, etc.) twice. That being said, things are even worse on mobile. Google notes that shopping cart abandonment on mobile devices is now an outrageous 97 percent. Again, that seems high (here’s the source for that figure), but the trend Google is illustrating with these slightly puffed up figures is not. For comparison’s sake, Monetate’s data put global cart abandonment at around 82 percent as of Q4 2012. The company has been seeing increases in cart abandonment – which had been around 60 percent over the past several years – due to an increased number of shoppers doing research on mobile phones and other devices. As they reach the point of checking out on mobile, they’re now more likely to give up and move on because of the increased difficulty of the experience on mobile’s small screen, combined with retailers’ failure to roll out mobile-optimized experiences even as percentages of mobile shoppers continue to grow at record rates. A number of startups have been attacking this challenge in various forms – mobile apps featuring universal carts, native m-commerce storefronts, mobile optimized payment flows, one-click mobile payments, in-stream payments, and more. Google’s plan? Leverage Chrome. Chrome is already the world’s most popular browser, with more than 750 million monthly active users today, up from 450 million just a year ago. Now it will begin baking in a speedier checkout experience into its browser by syncing your billing information and other details within Chrome. What that means is that, in the future, when you visit a website using the Chrome browser, including the Chrome mobile browser, you’ll automatically be offered up a prompt with your billing profiles. Chrome can then use autocomplete functionality to fill in information for you like your address, zip code, credit card info and more. This functionality is being introduced via a new requestAutocomplete API, which Google describes here as “an aspiring web standard that will allow users to bypass pages of form fields with an imperative API for requesting details the browser knows.”  Says Google, this drops the checkout process from 21 steps to just 3. Overall, it’s a worthy attempt at solving the problem with online checkout, but it still suffers from some potential obstacles to broader adoption: website owners will have to implement the functionality (the API) on their end, and unless this “aspiring” web standard becomes an “actual” web standard supported by all browsers, its impact would be limited. This feature is still in its early days, but it’s designed to be open. Presumably, the company would still want to at least offer support for payment information retrieved from users’ Google Wallet accounts, if not actually require it. (Theoretically, payment info could just be saved directly in Chrome or any other browser without the need for a Wallet account.) #2 Google Wallet On The Web (Um, Again): Google Wallet API While the above describes what will first be a Chrome-only feature to start, Google Wallet has already found a way to support the web and mobile web through more traditional means. In addition to supporting online checkout through Wallet, last fall, the company launched a Google Wallet API which allows e-commerce website owners to support checkout via Google Wallet on mobile devices. This is independent of the browser or mobile operating system however, making it more like an alternative to the PayPal button. It’s a bit confusing because with the new Chrome autocomplete functionality, it seems there will be some overlap between the two. Site owners would end up implementing two APIs to be fully supportive of Google users: one to speed up checkout through automated form filling in Chrome (likely pulling payment credentials from a user’s Google Wallet), and another if they wanted a Google Wallet button on their site which users could click to instead be walked through the Google Wallet checkout flow. Which is better? How will these two tie together? For now, Google can’t say, only noting that it’s still the “early days” for the Chrome autocomplete API and it’s probable that Google Wallet will be supported in some way. But nothing is definite yet. It’s a perfect example indicative of how Google needs to bring its separate teams together in order to tell a more cohesive story about payments. Rumor has it, the Wallet team has been too “siloed,” which has caused some issues. (See part #5 below, for example). #3 Going Wallet On Android: Paid Apps, In-App Purchases & Now, the Google Wallet Instant Buy Android API Android is the world’s most popular mobile operating system, so it only makes sense for Google to take advantage of that fact to pull in more users’ payment information. After all, today’s users are already using Google Wallet to purchase paid applications for Android devices as well as in-app purchases, so why not extend Wallet to support purchases of physical goods, too? That’s just what Google did. With today’s new Google Wallet Instant Buy Android API, merchants and developers selling physical goods and services (as opposed to virtual goods, like those sold in mobile games), can now offer 2-click checkout to their customers. At launch, the company has signed on a number of new partners, including Airbnb, Booking.com, Expedia, Fancy, GoPago live POS, NFC Task Launcher, Priceline, Rue La La, Tabbedout, Uber, and Wrapp. The service ties in also with Google+, allowing users to register and sign in to the apps, similar to Facebook Connect, and then tap to checkout without the need to enter in billing or shipping information. #4: Google Wallet in Gmail: “Attach” Money Another vector in the fight to topple PayPal is person-to-person payments – like paying the babysitter, or paying your dad the money you borrowed, for example. Digitally savvy folks today still largely turn to PayPal to make this happen. Google’s plan here? Leverage Gmail. It’s simple and ingenious really. The familiar email “attachment” icon has just become another onboarding experience for Google Wallet. With the Gmail update, the service’s 425 million+ users can hover over the attachment paperclip icon, then click the $ icon in order to “attach money” to their message. Of course, you’ll need a Google Wallet account first. For now, the feature is only available in the desktop version of Gmail, but it will certainly come to mobile in time. #5 Google Wallet In Real World? (What’s Plan B If NFC Never Wins?)  The only area where Google is lacking a solid strategy is in real world payments – an area where competitor PayPal has been ramping up quickly in recent months. PayPal has been working with nearly two-dozen nationwide retail chains, including Home Depot, Jamba Juice and more, to be integrated into their point-of-sale systems. It has separately announced integrations with point-of-sale and hardware makers like NCR, gas station and convenience store-focused Gilbarco Veeder-Root’s point-of-sale system, coin-counting kiosk maker Coinstar, and more. Google has been trudging along with its NFC-based Google Wallet app – an app using technology whose broader adoption has been slow to pick up here in the U.S., in part due to a lack of support from Apple, as well as swirling questions as to how much of an improvement tapping your phone at point-of-sale really has over a card swipe in the long run. Google had plans to launch a plastic “universal” credit card which would allow users to switch between their preferred payment methods on the fly while still using a physical card at point-of-sale. For whatever reason, the company scrapped those plans just ahead of Google I/O. Combined, all of the above areas on their own can’t be considered a PayPal killer by any means. But as they become more tightly integrated over time (assuming Google can get its teams together to focus on the bigger picture beyond their own product’s development and focus on the global stage), you can see a viable threat to PayPal starting to shape up.
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Indoor mapping software startup Meridian, continues to evolve their product strategy with a recent update to their offering. Called Zones, the company’s newest update to their indoor mapping platform — and indoor is the key word here — allows geo-fence style app push notifications to be scheduled, by drawing polygons on location maps. When customers with the accompanying app walk into one of those indoor areas represented by the polygon on the map…Bam! They get a push notification. To be sure, it’s a real marketing opportunity and a concept underserved by the current, mostly GPS-based location awareness model for mobile devices. Differentiators There are several geo-fencing platforms out there — PlaceCast, Digby Localpoint, Wifarer and ShopKick all come to mind — so what is the big deal here? Meridian’s VP of Marketing Jeff Hardison, believes there are several differences in the Meridian approach. First of all, this notification system will work even when the accompanying app is not open nor in active use — essentially working while the app is in background mode — without significant battery drain. Other geo-fence providers might be able to do this via GPS or cell tower triangulation, but not by WiFi sensing, which is how Meridian works. This means that once the WiFi network the location is using is recognized, that network can “wake up” the app and send push notifications when different Zones of the store are passed through. Most importantly, per Meridian’s secret sauce and strategy, this works with Wi-Fi triangulation for indoor maps and can function at a sensitivity of about 10 feet. This gives the system an advantage in locations where GPS antennas often fail — like, say, in a casino under ground parking garage. Recap To recap how Meridian’s technology works, the company has built a CMS and rapid app building platform so that partnered companies can upload maps of their locations into the CMS. Once their location maps are digitized and uploaded to the CMS tool, the geo-fences can be drawn on the location maps. The new or existing WiFi hotspots in the locations are then coupled with the map data. Accompanying mobile apps — also built with this system — can access the map data in order to display accurate indoor maps, based on location. Now the push notifications have been added to the mix. Software Development Kit You may have uncovered what could be seen as the Achilles Heel in the strategy, in that a brand’s native app must be built with Meridian’s app rapid builder technology (another offering they have). That could seem like a limitation for brands that already have their own app, and don’t want to rebuild with Meridian’s proprietary app-building tool. However, Jeff said the team is currently piloting an SDK approach for the Zones platform, so brands with existing apps can use the new push notification system with an existing app. This will be deployed in the coming months. Meridian is currently wrapping up live pilots with The Bellagio in Las Vegas and also with Fernbank Museum. They’ve also received some recognition from Cisco as a best of breed provider of indoor mapping technology and Cisco has actually integrated some of Meridian’s technology into their own hardware platforms.
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At its I/O developer conference, Google today announced a new Maps API for mobile developers, updates to Maps for Android and iOS and a completely refreshed Google Maps experience on the desktop. After the main keynote, however, Google also announced a major visual refresh for sites that use its Google Maps API. The refreshed look, with new base map tiles, default markers and window style, will become the default in the Google Maps API experimental branch (which, despite its name, is actually the most-often used branch) on August 15. Developers can also opt in to use it today by just changing a single line of code. It will roll out to the release branch, which is used by most Maps for Business customers, in November. The company said that more than 1 million sites use the Maps API, and all of them will get this visual refresh over the next few months. These sites reach about a billion users every week. This is what it’ll look like: Google says it “carefully designed the change to work seamlessly with all existing sites,” so developers don’t have to make any major changes to their existing sites. Here is a full list of all the major changes: Newly designed base map tiles. Markers, info windows, and map controls have been redesigned. The Scale control now appears on the bottom right, instead of the bottom left. The default fonts used in labels and UI elements has changed. The marker property raiseOnDrag has been replaced by crossOnDrag. All shadows have been removed in the visual refresh. Any shadows specified programmatically will be ignored.
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Phew. Google just spent three hours or so showing off new developer tools, APIs, service overhauls, and the occasional gadget, but not everything the search giant rolled out today got a turn under the spotlights at the Moscone Center. Case in point: according to a post on the official Google Commerce blog, Google Wallet support has been baked into Gmail, so users will soon be able to send each other money by simply shooting each other emails. In the coming weeks and months, a dollar sign will start popping in Gmail accounts of people who already use Google Wallet, and a quick click lets users define the recipient and the amount they’d like to send along as an attachment. Since all of these transactions run through Google Wallet, the usual caveats are in place — sending funds from a connected bank account is totally gratis, but those who prefer to pay with credit or debit cards are subject to an additional 2.9 percent fee tacked on. You also need to be over 18 to take part in the funding fun, though. Google is far from the first company to tackle the concept of sending money via email — JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo rolled out a method of transferring funds to people if you had their cell phone number or email address two years ago, but the setup process involved could be more than a little tedious if the recipient wasn’t a member of the same bank. At this point, it’s too early to pass judgment on Google’s approach, but the company seems intent on making the process much easier on all the parties involved, even if the person receiving the money isn’t a Gmail user. More importantly, it’s possible that folding a level of Wallet support into Gmail could see adoption of the payment platform tick upward. After all, Google said around this time last year that Gmail played home to 425 million users, and a considerable chunk of them will eventually find themselves able to transfer money without many headaches involved. Google’s announcement of its Instant Buy APIto streamline the process of buying things from within an Android app could certainly play a role in expanding Wallet’s prominence. These developments may not seem as downright prominent a push as, say, a Google-branded Wallet card that would solidify the service’s presence in meatspace, but former Wallet chief Osama Bedler is out, and that ship has sailed.
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Larry Page thinks we are, as a population, too negative. Especially the tech community. It’s a topic that he tackled a few times during his surprise Q&A after this morning’s Google I/O keynote, and it actually ended up being one of my favorite bits from the entire three hour presentation. The solution? Amongst other things, Larry wishes the world had some sort of permanent Burning Man-esque place for crazy builders to just be crazy. A place with less societal pressure, and without antiquated laws makin’ things sticky. Early on in his post-keynote speech, Page dug into the tech community for focusing too much on Company A vs. Company B: “… We’re at maybe 1% of what is possible. Despite the faster change, we’re still moving slow relative to the opportunities we have. I think a lot of that is because of the negativity… Every story I read is Google vs someone else. That’s boring. We should be focusing on building the things that don’t exist.” It’s something I’ve touched on before, and have been meaning to go back to for a while now. Even when something is quite clearly labeled as an experiment from day one — as with Google Glass — we collectively rush to lampoon it. “No one in the entire world would want this!”, shouts one site. “It’s the next Segway!” shouts a dozens others. “But at least they’re trying something crazy,” shouts pretty much no one. Is Google Glass a bit strange? Absolutely! It’s weird as hell. But it’s also a rare example of a company using their mountain of spare funds to try something crazy. It’s Sergey Brin gettin’ his Tony Stark on. It’s something we should absolutely be encouraging. It doesn’t have to win or lose. Few companies have the resources and talent to build crazy, real-world crap just to see what happens. Even fewer of those are willing to. In response to a question on how we could change the tide, and make the world a more positive place for people to build weird new things: Yeah that’s a really good question. I think people are naturally concerned about change. We’re changing quickly, but some of our institutions, like some laws, aren’t changing with that. The laws [about technology] cant be right if it’s 50 years old — that’s before the Internet. Maybe more of us need to go into other areas to help them improve and understand technology. We don’t want our world to change too fast. But maybe we could set apart a piece of the world .. I like going to Burning Man, for example. An environment where people can try new things. I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out new things and figure out the effect on society. What’s the effect on people, without having to deploy it to the whole world. (If you think about it, this is exactly what Google is doing with Glass, constrained to limitations of not actually having a dedicated physical space to do it in) Is it a bit Island Of Doctor Moreau? Sure, though it probably involves more rockets and robots than it does Leopard-Men and Beast Folk. But I’d buy a house there — or at the very least, I’d book myself an annual trip.
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Google announced today at I/O that it made Google Cloud Platform generally available, marking a milestone for the cloud community and the real arrival of a giant to contend with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its pay-as-you-go pricing. The service is now open to any developer or business. In its post announcing the news, Google revealed a bit about new pricing, instance types and other features: Sub-hour billing charges for instances in one-minute increments with a 10-minute minimum, so developers don’t pay for compute minutes that you don’t use. Shared-core instances provide smaller instance shapes for low-intensity workloads. Advanced Routing features help create gateways and VPN servers and enables developers to build applications that span local network and Google’s cloud Large persistent disks support up to 10 terabytes per volume, which Google says translates to 10X the industry standard Google also announced a new data store for non-relational data and availability of a PHP runtime. For a good part of last year, Google had engaged users in a limited beta of the platform, which allows developers to run their apps on Linux virtual machines hosted on Google’s massive infrastructure. Developers had to either get an invitation or go through Google’s sales teams to get access to the service. Starting in April, developers who subscribed to Google’s $400 per month Gold Support package with 24/7 phone support were able to access Compute Engine without the need to talk to sales or receive an invitation. Google also announced it dropped its instance prices by 4 percent (that’s after it already dropped storage prices by 20 percent last November). Google is emphasizing its cloud platform this year. There are 25 sessions for the Google Cloud Platform at Google I/O. Only Chrome and Android have more. Google is increasingly relying on its data-center infrastructure to attract developers. It offers the APIs to integrate with apps and now the capability to use the data centers for compute and storage. That’s an important shift if Google wants to attract more developers and compete with the AWS ecosystem.
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Well, that was fast: Just about a week ago, Microsoft released a YouTube app for its Windows Phone 8 platform. And today, YouTube is telling Microsoft remove it, saying that the app violates its terms of service. YouTube Director of Global Platform Partnerships Francisco Varela sent a cease-and-desist letter today to Todd Brix, GM of Windows Phone Apps, demanding that the his company take down the Microsoft-authored app. The letter claims that the application allows users to download videos from YouTube, while also stripping ads from the videos that it displays. It also shows videos that have been restricted from playback on certain platforms — like when a major media company doesn’t give YouTube the right to display videos on mobile phones or tablets. Updating…
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When we first met the team from Zivix their wild MIDI guitar, the Jamstik, promised a unique music-making experience thanks to a tether that connected it to a computer or iOS device. In the few short months since CES, however, they’re now preparing to announce that Jamstik works nearly flawlessly over Wi-Fi with iPhones and iPads, thereby reducing the need for a physically tethered device. The Jamstik, which has surpassed its Indigogo goal with 13 days to go, is the first product by Zivix that aims to make music education and composition far easier than on a normal guitar. Not unlike the GTar, the Jamstik outputs MIDI signals as you play. However, instead of electrical connections with the strings the Jamstik uses IR sensors to “see” where your fingers are on the fretboard, allowing for tricks like string bending and hammer-ons and -offs. The new prototypes have full MIDI over WiFi support, allowing you to connect to an iOS device completely wirelessly. The Jamstik actually creates its own ad hoc network with your device, allowing you to maintain a connection to your favorite audio program without having to connect cables. In the demo I saw today the Jamstik maintained a solid connection for most of an hour and, using Audiobus, you could transmit audio from one program to another, allowing for some amazing mixed MIDI and audio recordings. The company plans to go into production in 30 days and they have 17 days left on their Indiegogo campaign. The device itself is $299 and the company is in talks to get it into retail stores in Q4 for general consumers. It’s an exciting time to be a musician, that’s for sure.
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YouTube’s live offering took a big step forward today, with the announcement that access to the feature will soon be available to a large number of its partners. While YouTube Live was previously only available to a handful of handpicked channels and partners, the feature will now be rolled out to any YouTube channel in good standing with more than 1,000 subscribers. The opening up of YouTube Live to more creators comes two years after it first announced the feature. But it also is being rolled out after YouTube has had some serious stress testing on the product, including live streaming of the 2012 Olympics and the big Red Bull dude-jumping-from-space thing. Now open to more users, the ability to stream live video could change the way that YouTube creators communicate with audiences, as they’re finally able to step beyond the current on-demand paradigm of uploading videos to the site. Now, they’ll be able to schedule live events and launch impromptu live streams to be shared with their subscribers. To determine eligibility, creators should check their Account Features page for an “Enable” button to sign up for Live. YouTube creators who qualify will get live transcoding in the cloud and the ability to stream multiple camera angles. YouTube, meanwhile, will take care of all the hard work on the back end to get those live streams to as many devices as possible. YouTube uses adaptive bit-rate streaming to power the feature, giving viewers access to the high-quality video available, regardless of whether they’re watching on a PC, mobile phone or tablet.
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Wearable computing looks more and more like the inevitable future, so today Stained Glass Labs launches to help entrepreneurs develop apps and businesses around Google Glass and similar devices. The incubator and accelerator will offer mentorship, office space, and one day maybe funding as well. Stained Glass Labs is spearheaded by Redg Snodgrass, who formerly supported innovation and developers at Alcatel-Lucent, and worked at startups Skout and Taploid. The group aims to give entrepreneurs “the tools, the technology, the connections, and the support to take [wearable computing] products to a main stream market.” Those hoping to join Stained Glass Labs can apply now. It’s looking for both idea-stage companies to incubate, and funded startup with a product in the works to accelerate. To aid those admitted, Stained Glass Labs will provide office space plus inroads to PR. It has also assembled a team of mentors “who have been successful entrepreneurs from all sides of the industry to be a sounding board and helping hand.” The mentors include Charles Hudson of SoftTech VC, Jacob Mullins of Exitround (and formerly Shasta Ventures), Greg Gopman of AngelHack, Ashwin Navin of BitTorrent, Julie Mossler of Waze, and Andy McLoughlin of Huddle. Though the organization has no equity investment component, so those admitted don’t have to give up a stake, Stained Glass Labs wouldn’t legally be able to talk about it if they were raising a fund. One interesting quirk is that the incubator has a preference for second-time entrepreneurs rather than rookies. Stained Glass Labs will operate in a similar space as the better-established powerhouse partnership Glass Collective, which will see Andreessen Horowitz, Kleiner Perkins, and Google Ventures sharing wearable computing startup funding deal flow. Right now, Stained Glass Labs seems a bit half-baked, but it has a lot of potential. Wearable computing will spawn a huge ecosystem of startups. If Snodgrass and his incubator can forge relationships with these companies early on, they could gain power as the startups grow alongside the wearable wave.
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