This Week in Google 255 (Transcript)

Leo LaPorte: It’s time for TWiG, This Week in Google and we are just back from the Google IO keynote. Jeff and Gina were in the room. They’ve brought me back something really exciting. What could it possibly be? Fresh from Google IO, next.

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Leo: This is TWiG, This Week in Google. Episode number 255, recorded June 25^th, 2014

93 Million Selfies

This Week in Google is brought to you by Smart Things. The easiest and most affordable way to create a smart home. Protect and control your home from anywhere with no contracts or monthly fees. For 10% off any home security kits, visit smartthings.com/twit and use the code twig10 at check-out. And by, hover.com. Hover’s the best way to buy and manage domain names. It’s simple, honest and easy to use. For 10% off your first purchase, go to hover.com and enter the promo code twig6. It’s time for TWiG, This Week in Google, and this is the week for Google. The Google IO conference started this morning and low and behold, look who’s here. Jeff Jarvis and Gina Trapani. Came up over the bridge.

Jeff Jarvis: Here we are.

Gina Trapani: Hi.

Leo: Over the river and through the woods.

Jeff: And over the bridge.

Gina: We didn’t even talk about the bridge.

Jeff: It was fine because somebody else drove and it was foggy.

Leo: Oh, did you have a…

Gina: We were chatting.

Jeff: We had Walt.

Leo: That’s great, I love Walt. Walt will keep you occupied. So, welcome first of all.

Gina: Thank you.

Leo: Nice to see you. So nice to have you in the studio.

Gina: So great to be here.

Leo: We covered it this morning. Kevin Marks and…

Jeff: … and covered it and covered it and covered it.

Leo: I started at 9 and it went almost 2.5 hours. A very long keynote speech. And so long, I think a lot of the interesting things were buried in a lot of needless detail. But there is good news for those who went to Google IO. Cardboard. This is the gift? Wait a minute; we should say you did get a certificate, good for either an LG G-Watch or a Samsung Gear Live. And you’re going to get a Moto 360 whenever that comes out.

Gina: Right, later this year.

Leo: But you’re currently at nothing.

Gina: That’s the only thing we walked out with.

Leo: Watch, because I can just take this and put it together. It’s a little kit. If you’re really ingenious enough, and there it is. It turns into, wait a minute. What the hell is that? Now you put a phone in there. Will it work with any smart phone?

Gina: Any smart phone.

Leo: Has to run Android. Did you have to install an Android app?

Gina: No, this is a Chrome experiment which is not currently loaded up.

Leo: Oh, so you have to load it on the phone. So what happens is you remember this. This is like the view master and you press the thing. But instead of a view master, you’ve loaded it with a phone and then watch, I’m going to put it to my eyes. And oh, look I see the stars that are beautiful. Wait a minute what’s that? And if you look at it long enough, what’s really interesting is, just like the Oculus Rift it moves with your head, pretty quickly.

Jeff: Take that Mark Zuckerberg!

Gina: It’s a cardboard rift.

Leo: How much did they pay for Oculus? Four billion?

Gina: Apparently this is a 20% time project from the Google engineers. They wanted to see what they could do with cardboard.

Leo: If you go to g.co/cardboard, you can see it yourself. And even build it yourself if you really want to.

Jeff: Gina spent quite a long while in the car figuring it out.

Leo: Well I have no difficulty at all.

Jeff: She was sticking her tongue out a few times.

Leo: And there is an app, apparently.

Gina: I was like, I don’t care. I was sure I could just stick the tabs where they need to go.

Leo: Less than IKEA-style directions. Just do this.

Jeff: Gina made it all, figured it out, then she finally went to the page and said oh instructions!

Gina: That’s how it usually works for me.

Leo: Virtual reality has made exciting progress over the past several years. This really is up yours to market, isn’t it.

Jeff: It is.

Leo: The result is cardboard, and no frills enclosures, transforms a phone into a basic VR headset. And the company’s open-software toolkit… you know this is really a little bit of a takeoff of that thing the Motorola X does with the hat. And it’s kind of fun, play a game and aim up and down.

Gina: I bet if we loaded up the hat and stuck it in the cardboard, it would be really cool.

Leo: And it uses the accelerator.

Jeff: I think it’s cooler than this.

Leo: What’s that? They didn’t mention that at all. You do get an upgrade to 2GB, but you have to buy it. 2GB of RAM.

Gina: As soon as Jeff saw the watch demo, he turned around to me and said he was getting rid of this, pointing to his Glass.

Jeff: Two-thirds of the functionality is gone.

Leo: Wow, alright. So there you have it. That was…

Gina: That was the big giveaway today.

Leo: Gina, I think it’s going to be a bit easier to get into Google IO next year. I’m just guessing that, but I said this. I said of course you’re going to have trouble at Google IO. We had to try like the dickens to get Gina in.

Jeff: We had to whine and whine and whine on this show.

Leo: Pull strings.

Jeff: And thank you folks for letting us both in.

Leo: But, I think part of that was because they gave away last year, they gave away a lot of stuff. The year before, a lot of stuff. And it seems like a good deal to spend $900 to get in, and get more than that worth of goodies.

Gina: Right, the Pixels.

Leo: Soon went on sale on eBay.

Jeff: I love this one.

Leo: You can make money at it. But I think this is not going to sell for much on eBay.

Gina: But then we each get two watches, so I mean…

Leo: You get the choice of the Samsung or the LG and then the Moto later.

Jeff: So which one should we get?

Leo: Did they give any more information about these watches, like what they’re going to sell for?

Jeff: They’re going to go on sale this afternoon.

Gina: They said they would be on sale in the Play store this afternoon.

Leo: Not yet. So, when they go on sale, I guess we’ll then know how much it’s going to be. They didn’t say a price, and they didn’t even say anything more than Moto 360 available sometime this summer. But we did see it, it is circular, right? In fact, I think Nuptchai was wearing a circular watch.

Gina: 250 I think is what we talked about.

Jeff: Gear Live will be available for pre-order later today at 199.

Leo: So the Gear 2 is $300.

Jeff: LG is 229.

Leo: Okay.

Jeff: Previously announced.

Leo: So which one are you going to pick?

Jeff: Which one should I?
Leo: Oh you’re asking me, like I know?

Jeff: I don’t know what the difference is. Your view I think is that Samsung has been making an error…

Leo: I like the Gear 2, I mean it’s limited as they are. I liked it. The problem is that it’s a very Samsung-specific device. That’s what you should find out. It probably won’t work with your Nexus or your HTC.

Gina: I got the impression it’s Android-wear so it talks to Android no matter what.

Leo: See that would be great.

Jeff: It ought to be. There were some important things today and we’ll go over it all. Going across platform easily is one of the main points. The coming together of Android and Chrome and that’s how they’re going to cross platforms so you can have an Android app on your computer. Your Android app can talk to your watch. Your watch is syncing with your Android app. It really has gotten fairly impressive going across here.

Leo: I made notes as we talked. Until my energy gave out and I just collapsed in a puddle. And we can go through this one by one. They did, of course start as every… this is by the way the fourth big company’s keynote we’ve seen. It started with Build, Microsoft’s Build, gosh months ago. Then WWDC, Facebook’s F8 conference. You could throw in the Amazon phone announcement. It was a developer announcement, but you can throw that in. And now Google gets kind of the last word with Google IO. This was the longest and had the least sales pitch stuff in it. And easily the most developer-specific stuff. Way more specific than any of the others. But they did begin with a little bit of marketing. They said now Android has one billion monthly active users. One billion with a B. Easily dwarfing, iOS has 800 million, but of the 800 million, only 600 million are phones. But I guess you’re including tablets here too.

Jeff: One of the great little slates was that it doesn’t include Amazon. That wouldn’t be very much.

Leo: He didn’t mention that. Amazon is Android.

Jeff: There were a few very subtle swipes at Amazon.

Leo: And Apple too, and Microsoft. They didn’t want to talk about Microsoft, but a number of things were targeted at Microsoft. Twenty billion text messages a day sent over Android. Ironically, that dwarfs the number of text messages sent over What’s App. Which is, I looked it up and it was more than that. I think it was 23 billion or more a day. As many as they send, as many text messages are sent over Android, more are sent over What’s App. So it doesn’t dwarf it, it’s the opposite. What’s the opposite? It giants it. Ninety-three million selfies a day. This is not something I would tout.

Gina: It’s an art form.

Leo: That’s got to be a joke because how do you know it’s a selfie?

Gina: Facial recognition.

Leo: Which way the camera is pointed? How do you know it’s a selfie? Sixty-two percent of tablets globally, that’s a big deal because the other 38% is iPads. They didn’t have to go in and talk to Kell Stu or anything like that. They just had to say, well we have a billion active monthly users, what do you got? Before they announced the L-word, they announced… by the way that’s what it’s going to be called, the L-word. The real L-word, before they announced that, Android won. Which is a platform, an interesting platform, looks like a turnkey platform for handset makers in the developing world that allows them to make some hundred-dollar Android phones with Google services.

Jeff: With guaranteed updates, with all kinds of things. Security. And it’s appropriate to the market. I don’t know why in India you always want double-zooms, but you do.

Leo: And FM radio.

Jeff: FM radio, which is important to the market and under $100. I was surprised they didn’t give that away. Look what you can do and it’s going to explode mobile telephony. The big thing today was, to me, this is a mobile company. It is mobile.

Leo: They even said that. They said they were going to talk about mobile.

Jeff: By the way, you can also make that great thing we used to call a web browser…

Gina: Well it will expand nicely for the web as well.

Jeff: It was, do it from mobile. That was the whole message of the day to me.

Gina: And Play supports auto-installation of local content. So you can distribute these phones with local relevant apps that just get auto-updated. It looks interesting and really nice.

Leo: They also said, and this was a response to Taksi-Helsu that 93% of all Android phones do at least have the latest version of Play. And they are going to start distributing security updates via Play, and are doing and end-around on that. On the carriers.

Jeff: Which I said on Twitter, that’s their round and round for implementation. Then somebody else said look what L is bringing? That’s why updates matter. Because there’s tons of functionality and design that comes to L that’s not going to be in Play.

Leo: And this has always been a problem. It’s not that people don’t want the latest version of Android. It’s the carriers and manufacturers that don’t put it on their phones. So you have a hard time getting it. And people are not really willing to get a new phone just so they can get the latest version of Android. The latest version will be L. We know that K is Kit Kat. J was jelly bean. And on back, they’re all desserts. We know it will be L, but we don’t know which dessert. They haven’t announced it. Leche? Licorice?

Jeff: Kevin Marks had an unusual suggestion we heard.

Leo: Laffy-Taffy.

Gina: Oh it was Jason last night that said laffy-taffy. I thought Kevin suggested Lindt. I don’t think so. It doesn’t quite fit. That brand doesn’t quite fit. It’s not quite Kit Kat.

Leo: Jason’s joke was laffy-taffy. Maybe it may well be given that they made a relationship that I’m sure made some money, Kit Kat making a relationship with Nestle. Maybe they’ll do the same thing with L.

Gina: Maybe and that deal hasn’t closed, so that’s why we’re just calling it L.

Leo: Lemon Heads.

Gina: I found it strange that we were referring to it as L.

Jeff: They don’t have the little doll ready for the yard.

Gina: Right, the statue hasn’t been shipped yet.

Leo: Well this is one thing they said. We want to let developers look at the new version of Android early from now on. So this really is an announcement of an STK well before the version comes out.

Gina: There’s a tremendous amount of design changes here. Material design, some of the new themes. This is something the developers want to get ahead of time, to get ahead of before it gets released.

Leo: Apple announced 4000 new APIs with iOS 8. Now they have 5000. But I thought having to learn 5000 new APIs, it wasn’t a good thing.

Gina: I know. It made me feel kind of tired.

Leo: It was overwhelming!

Gina: I have a long to-do list.

Leo: How do you do that? Each new API reflects either a change in the way you interact with an existing service, or a new service entirely. And do you just wait until you need something and then look it up? Or do you kind of browse it and say, let’s see what I can do? You don’t learn all 5000.

Gina: Right, you don’t learn all 5000. It really depends. For something like Android-wear, this is a whole new device, a whole new category. You want to be ahead of the curve. When these watches hit the market, you want your app to be awesome for it. You want your app to be in the demos. So that’s something that you go ahead on, and try to learn all the Android-wear APIs and make your app do something special and interesting. The rest of the 5000, look you have an idea for something you want to build. If it’s difficult, you do some research. Does this new thing make it easier? And then you use it as you need it.

Leo: See I understand the basic outline of what is capable. By the way, Tim Dow corrects me on Twitter. Apple said 800 million devices sold to date, not 800 million active users. So a billion active monthly users is a big deal. That’s a big deal. That’s Facebook numbers. They did release STKs for almost all the new stuff, including the L… what did they call it?
Gina: The L-release. The preview.

Leo: You mind if I call it the L-word?
Gina: Not at all. That was the first thing that came to mind for me.

Jeff: As the spokesman for the entire community.

Leo: It’s what leaps to mind, I’m sorry. They introduced Mattias Dwarte, who is a Chilean wearing a hound’s-tooth check coat and a paisley shirt. He’s in charge of the look and feel of Android.

Gina: Ever the show producer.

Leo: He also had the beard, it looked a little like the guy in Silicon Valley, the Javiato guy. I’m not sure this is the guy you want developing… but it does look nice.

Jeff: It does look nice.

Leo: Paul Thwart was at great pains to point out this is kind of what Windows Phone did, the grid, the active tiles. Things when you tap them move. At first I thought because he said material design, I thought what are they going to do, change the material. They showed a screen with stuff up. But no it’s just the feeling that something’s coming out.

Jeff: There’s an X, Y, and a Z.

Gina: Right there’s a Z, so there are buttons floating on top and you can feel distance.

Leo: I didn’t ask you, but last night on All About Android, you all predicted what you think you would see at Google IO. How close do you think you came?
Gina: We did okay. We were on on a few things. I didn’t think Android TV was going to happen today. We were very pro, I thought that they were going to lead off this show with Android Wear and Fit. That seemed like the most obvious new consumer thing. And that was sort of more towards the middle.

Leo: I feel like this was an opportunity lost, a little bit. I understand, this is a developer conference and we say that before we did build, before we did WWDC. We said, look is it a developer conference? Is this messaging for developers? But you do have, and particularly with Google IO, the press was all there. We couldn’t get anybody to help me on the show because everybody said no, I have to cover this I have to be there. This is really an important event and I feel like they didn’t do a lot of consumer messaging. That’s a little bit of a missed opportunity.

Gina: There’s definitely attention. Here’s the thing, they have to lay the ground work with the developers, get the developers excited, and convince a developer that if they build for this, they’re going to make money and they’re going to be successful. Before the consumer launch…

Leo: Don’t bang the table, you’re making me nervous.

Gina: Sorry.

Leo: Especially that chopping.

Gina: So the consumer launch can have the apps and have the support for things that consumers want. And it’s a tough tension. I felt there have been times when there were developer conferences, and this should have been a press event. That bugs me because it really is a developer conference.

Jeff: It’s definitely a developer’s conference. But don’t invite all the press there. This isn’t for you, this is geek time.

Leo: I think Apple showed at WWDC that you can split the difference. That you can have a show that’s really for developers, and of course it’s really the breakout sessions that come out later that are really for developers. You could have left a lot of that especially towards the end, in breakout sessions and you would’ve shortened the keynote and you wouldn’t have diluted this message. We as it is have to dig for nuggets in this pile of stuff.

Gina: And it’s a big pile. Here’s the thing, there was a lot of good material. I just don’t think they structured it well enough.

Jeff: I don’t think they demonstrated… I think your point is right, Leo. They could have demonstrated it to real people. When they showed how the watch can do this and that, oh you can write an app to call for pizza.

Leo: That was cool!

Jeff: That speaks to people. So they didn’t make it real enough because they had so much material to go through.

Leo: They buried the lead.

Jeff: They did. What was the lead?

Leo: I don’t know. Our job is to dig and find the pony in that pile of information that Google has given us. And we will find the pony in just a little bit. Jeff Jarvis, nice to have you in the studio, Gina Trapani. I’m so happy. I think Mike and Jason are on their way back. They may have stuck around a little longer than you did. If they do show up, we’ll get them on the panel as well. I really thought they were going to say, and we’re creating with Nest, a hub for your home and your automation and we’re going to base it on Android Home. None of that. But that’s good news for smart things, if you want to automate your home, we’ve been looking for ages for a way to do this. Simply to find a hub that will talk. At home I’ve got the hue lights, I’ve got the Sonos, I want to get the Schlage door that unlocks automatically. I want my curtains to open automatically when the sun comes up, and close when the sun goes down. All of those things, and Smart Things has actually put together a hub that is very cool. And I want to show you. This is the Smart Things hub, and I want to say this was a Kickstarter project. I’m trying to remember where this started.

Gina: It was, and I actually backed it. It was really cool. And I got the kit and I love it. I can tell you about it. Tell us about it, and I’ll tell you more.

Leo: I’ll tell you what they told me to tell you and then you can tell me what you want to tell me. So the hub is the thing that communicates with everything else. And it does work across many platforms, GE, Schlage, Honeywell, Eon, Nest works absolutely. Philips Hue works, the Wemo, which is Belkin’s really cool little sensor. Now you can get a kit and that’s probably what you got, the basic kit, the smart home security kit. $329, you’re going to get the hub, a smart sense motion sensor. So you can put this in the hallway when you get home. Lots of different things you can do with a motion sensor obviously. Put it in the garage or outside to turn on the lights. The smart sense presence sensor, which is kind of a neat thing. You can put it on a keychain to let you know when the keys have left the house or on your dog or your cat, to let you know when the cat has run away. It will tell you when cars arrive and leave your home. It can help you where you left your keys. This is really cool. You get one of those as well. You also get the multi, which is the most amazing thing. It looks like those sensors that you’ve seen on alarm systems that go on windows. And you can certainly use it that way, it’s a two-piece way. So when you open the window, the connection is broken. But this does more than that. It has sensors in here that tell you the temperature. It’s got an accelerometer. It can alert you if you’ve left the garage door open. It can do all sorts of things. So you get this whole kit with this basic Smart Things kit that will turn your home into a smart home within minutes. It’s very easy to pair, you just pull the tab out of the device. It all pairs up very automatically.

Jeff: No wires to run?
Leo: No wires to run. It all plugs in and is all wireless. There is a growing community, over 5000 developers now, who are creating new ways to use Smart Things. The smarter home security kit adds an additional motion sensor, a smart power outlet, a siren and strobe alarm. And then the smartest kit for $599 gives you all the stuff I’ve mentioned, plus an additional presence sensor. You get a power outlet that’s nice. You can put a light on there that turns on when you get home. And an outdoor light plug and control power outlet. So that’s really nice. So pick your kit, then use the offer code twit10 at checkout. And you’ll get free shipping within the US and ten percent off the purchase of any home security kit. I remember when this was a Kickstarter project and it was really designed to make this whole process a lot easier. So you backed it?

Gina: I did!

Leo: What was it that got you excited about it?
Gina: I backed the project. I hadn’t done a whole lot of playing around with home automation stuff. And it was a friend of a friend and the video got me. So I backed the project, this is September 2012, a couple years now. And I just loved it. It was such a great product, the app was beautiful. The things were awesome.

Leo: They raised a lot of money, $1.2M. You see how far the hub has come. That was the original hub and look how nice and sleek it is.

Gina: It’s nice and small now. This is a more polished product. I had it set up so my lights came on when the sun went down, which was nice. I had the motion detector hooked up to my mailbox. So I got a push notification when my mail came.

Leo: Works for Android or iPhone, right?

Gina: Yea. And I put the presence detector on my daughter’s stroller because I just like to know when she went in and out for a walk during the day. They got home, they left, because I don’t have  cat. And also, the motion detector… we had it on our safe. If you have a gun box or something, if it moves you get a push notification. It was really fun and easy to set up. And I enjoyed it.

Jeff: Gun box?

Gina: I don’t know.

Leo: It’s Brooklyn. You need weapons.

Gina: I used that as an example. We put it on our safe, we don’t have a gun box. But if you did. And if you had a child.

Leo: Well now they’re out in the public in the world, thanks to people like Gina who helped support the project initially. And really, this is a refined beautiful project that works so well. I’m not going to show you my welcome code.

Gina: Don’t. Because you’ll get taken over and will have to get another one. It’s a great product, I really love it. I was excited to see they are a sponsor.

Leo: I have mine at home. I’m really excited about this, and I really want to get into home automation. I was disappointed that Google didn’t say word one about this. I feel like it’s going to be Google or Apple. Somebody’s going to step up. Maybe Smart Things will step up and say forget it.

Jeff: Everybody, make your own stuff. And now we can start working across multiple platforms, get some standards and APIs.

Leo: Right now you have these silos. It isn’t working. Alright ladies and gentlemen, we’re digging. There’s a pony in here somewhere. What do you think of the… as Mattias started showing the grids and new design, I thought of you immediately. For most of this, I thought of Gina Trapani and I figured you’re going to be our expert on this. How different is this? I do know that one of the complaints I hear people like Andy Inocho. For years I tried to get him to use an Android phone. He says no it’s just not as elegant. Things don’t line up. For years, Android did feel that way. A little ill-designed, a little clunky. These new tools are obviously designed to address that.

Gina: Definitely.

Leo: Does this give the L-release a parody with the beautifully designed iPhone, you think?

Gina: I think so. I was very impressed with the material design stuff and I’m very excited about My App. My App, which is just a simple list app, and most apps are where you’re scrolling down a list. It’s going to make those, the spacing and the nice natural scroll action. Having that hover button, I really like having that sticky headers, that just naturally sort of contract as you scroll up. It looked really beautiful to me and I’m excited about it. I think that the complaint that Android is just not as pretty, or not pretty enough, or not as aesthetically pleasing. I think that’s a done deal.

Leo: It was kind of a done deal. Mattias started Honeycomb and has slowly gradually moved us to a much better looking platform. I think it’s been a done deal since Kit Kat for sure.

Gina: I agree. When they show the side by side of the current Gmail with the new Gmail using the material design, I mean it really felt like a breath of fresh air.

Jeff: It’s stuff they could’ve done before. Aesthetics, now the paisley helps you know.

Leo: Okay I’m not going to mock him. But he did have some odd stuff to wear.

Jeff: Well then, what was the guy with the black t-shirt, you couldn’t see it. What’s his name? He was an odd-ling.

Gina: He was the director of Android engineering.

Jeff: It was an odd shift. They all got the odd shirt memo. They all got the watch memo, and the odd shirt memos.

Leo: They all were wearing smart watches whose screens were blank. So we couldn’t tell what they were using. It was obvious, especially the two women that presented. As always with smart watches on small wrists, these things really look clunky. And I don’t think they were able to dress them up to the point of where they don’t look a little clunky.

Jeff: I was just looking at the LG G site, and they try to make them look glamorous.

Gina: And they did that at the keynote a little bit. There was that shot of somebody leaning up against a pool table, being all hipster and stylish, wearing the watch. The one thing I did like about the watch is that it’s black until you hold it up, then it goes full color.

Leo: The Gear 2 does that as well.

Jeff: It’s always on.

Leo: You don’t want to leave the screen on all the time because it will kill the battery. So when you move it, raise it, it turns on. Pebble does that too.

Jeff: See here they’re trying to make it look glamorous. It says search for LG G.

Leo: You’ll see immediately if you’re watching the video…

Jeff: They have videos of this too so we’ll see how they’re marketing it.

Leo: Let’s see. Here it is. This is what Jeff is talking about. First there was the sun. Then… now this is the phone. I want the watch.

Jeff: Search for LG G-Watch.

Leo: LG G-Watch.

Gina: So they lead with her style, they lead with….

Jeff: Yea, they do.

Leo: Powered by Android. Hi, I’ve got big rings, so my watch has to be big too.

Jeff: You don’t know it but I’m a champion arm wrestler.

Leo: You know that does not look good. That really does not look good.

Jeff: It looks more awkward on him there than it does on her.

Leo: Nerds! Double nerds! This is the problem with these things. They have to be big because they have to have a big battery, and of course the screen has to be big usable.

Gina: This is an opportunity for a larger-wristed model.

Jeff: It works well with the murse, I think don’t you?

Leo: It’s not a murse, it’s a European carry-on. Nice Volkswagen. I love that.

Gina: I’m definitely looking forward to the 360, for style reasons.

Jeff: It will look good on the screen. There’s some videos at the end of the presentation.

Leo: Let’s finish up with the L-word and then we’ll get to watch this because that’s a big thing too. But I want to make sure we get on. So Palette, is material designer, there’s Palette. That’s the library you’re going to use.

Gina: Polymer.

Leo: Polymer, what’s Palette?

Jeff: Palette was something they announced last year.

Leo: One thing about that library, is that it’s across platforms. So it’s not just for Android. I can use it for my web design. So the UI can look…

Jeff: This to me was really crucial. In my field, we’re starting to think about digital. Mobile. What’s really happening there, is Google is designing mobile first. And then by the way, you can adapt that to the web. You can put this on the web. I think that’s really critical. They’re proud of the web browser, but when they talked about Chrome, they talked about mobile Chrome. They talked about Chrome, trying to put the ChromeBook. They weren’t talking about the web.

Leo: It was pretty apparent throughout all of this keynote, is that the hub for all of this is the phone. And then you have the phone, you have TVs, you have laptops, you have tablets. We used to think of the PC as the hub. The phone is the hub.

Jeff: The crucial phrase for me the entire morning was the computer is now small enough to wear on your body all day. So they’re looking at this as a computer. This is a computer, is your computer for now and it connects to this. I think in the long run, this will be your primary computer. There will be integrated display devices separately from that. And this is your authentication, this is your communication, this is your everything. You might need a bigger antenna. Fine, you have this nearby. You might need a bigger display, you have this nearby. But your computer and identity will be in this eventually. I think.

Leo: So Polymer is this cross-platform library. This is not the first time they’ve talked about it. They actually did talk about it last year. Web components usher in a new era of web development based on encapsulated inter-operable custom elements that extend to HTML.

Gina: Blah, blah, blah. But basically this is a kit for you to build your apps across all platforms. And it’s basically, I think we’ve talked to Boot Strap from Twitter. This is similar to Boot Strap but it sounds like this is even more so.

Leo: And you develop, okay…

Gina: You get a bunch of UI elements for free. On the Polymer page, it’s polymerproject.org, you’ll see buttons that when you hover above them they’ll have certain effects. They have the material design effects. So you’ll be able to implement those things in your app very easily.

Jeff: The more they do that, the more the number of people can make it.

Gina: Right, then you can concentrate on your content and your app versus having to style your buttons, basically. So you get a lot of things for free as a developer. It’s interesting they have this code here on Get Hub and not Google Code. Are they going to where the developers are rather than asking developers to come to them? And I’m excited about this. I’m definitely going to play around with this.

Leo: Look at this playground. This is kind of cool.

Gina: It’s BSD-licensed. A little whizzy wig action going on there.

Leo: You can drag it in and change the skin, and the content and the code. Here’s a map. These are all little widgets. Here’s a smoothie chart. Here’s a speech mic, I like this idea. Put a little mic there that you can click. So all of these things, there’s the smoothie chart, there’s the mic. This is kind of cool. And this is actually web-based, which really shows the power of the browser these days. Wow. Alright, so Palette, Polymer, the L-release. Project Volta, this is interesting.

Jeff: That was interesting too.

Leo: One of the things Apple got a lot of attention for in iOS 8 is finally they’re going to break down battery use by app. Google one upped them on that. Battery use, hell, we’re going to show you wake states, wake locks. We’re going to basically instrument everything, and as a developer, you’re going to be able to see what everything is doing.

Jeff: Does that also work for shame developers, too?

Gina: Oh, absolutely. This is when the protester started, where the battery stuff kind of got…

Leo: There were two protesters, by the way I would like to point out the gender distribution among protesters was 50% women. So that’s nice.

Jeff: They’re better than the developer on…

Gina: Better than Google got in attendees.

Leo: 20% women attendees, but 50% protesters. So there’s that. The second protester was saying that you’re all working for a company that makes…

Jeff: makes robots that kill people.

Leo: Does Google have robots that kill people? Should I be worried? They bought that Boston company that makes killer robots.

Jeff: Are they killer robots?

Leo: They don’t make drones. The first one that was protesting housing.

Gina: He wanted Google’s lawyers.

Jeff: Leo, robots don’t kill people. Algorithms kill people.

Leo: Anyway, not a surprise in fact we heard that, and I don’t know if you saw this, but some of the protesters would be dressed as storm troopers outside of Mosconi Center. Did you see some?

Gina: I did see some.

Jeff: This town is getting ridiculous.

Leo: Not this town, this is Petaluma.

Jeff: That town is getting ridiculous.

Gina: Someone on Twitter said, How should we trust them with our data if they can’t even keep somebody out of the keynote?

Leo: Well, that is a good point!

Gina: It was interesting. Security, no one moved. I mean, the protester was talking.

Jeff: They had a security person standing in every single row. And they didn’t touch a muscle when this happened.

Leo: Were they just stunned?

Jeff: The white shirts were not authorized. It was the blue shirts that came in finally and talked. They didn’t know what to do. Do just do what you do.

Leo: They did in fact escort them gently out. I’m told they did not tackle them, they didn’t taze them.

Gina: There was no drama. At first you thought, oh is this part of the presentation?

Jeff: Because nobody moved. Nobody did anything.

Gina: Paralyzed geeks.

Leo: Famous for its police department. Right? They have this whole division of security and police and when they come to your house… when Kevin Rose’s protestors were out he said, well I just called the Google police. And they handled it. And I went oh…

Gina: The Google police. The Google police are asleep today.

Leo: They sound scary but I’m glad to hear they’re not. Alright, let’s talk about Google Wear because that was Android Wear. That was the next topic. They did demonstrate the LG G-Watch which looked pretty cool.

Jeff: It did.

Leo: I don’t want square. I’m with you. I want round. I don’t care if it’s big round, I don’t care if it’s Flava-Flave round.

Jeff: It they make it small square, will that work?

Leo: No.

Jeff: It’s the shape, not the size?

Leo: Well, I’m wearing a rectangular watch, but no…

Gina: You are… it just looks too like the Casio watch. The bezel is big and it just doesn’t feel stylish. It feels like a computer on your wrist.

Jeff: The design worked. The demonstration, it looked okay.

Leo: It was very much what we’ve seen already with the videos that they showed at the last mention of Android. Where was that, that we saw that? I can’t remember. But they have basically, Google Now cards… in fact, that is another take away, the cardification of everything. Those cards are now on Chrome, the browser when you look at recents on Chrome. It’s cards.

Gina: Very much a part of material design. Those cards should act like cardstock, float and shuffle and move.

Jeff: I think was hidden and important, is their prioritizing the cards. They’re prioritization your notifications. All your notifications. So they’re recognizing what’s important. And I’ve talked on this show in the past, among more boring moments. Bruce Meyer talking years ago about the notion of a hyper-personal news stream. That Google prioritizes what you do, and I think we saw the start of that today.

Leo: In terms of which cards show up and when.

Jeff: Yes. And knowing that this is a reason to interrupt you.

Leo: The watch will know where you are, if you’re late to your flight. It’ll know when you walk into the airport, it will show your QR code. This is something the phone’s done all along. It’s a little more useful. The phone is in my pocket and I don’t see it doing that. The watch, I can see…

Jeff: The number, I think it was 125 times a day. We check our phones.

Leo: That was the number they gave.

Jeff: So now if it’s always on and always there…

Leo: Eight times an hour if you’re up every day.

Gina: Yea. Which is, I was teasing Ron last night. He installed an app that monitors his cell phone addiction. And it had tracked that he unlocked his phone 110 times in 24 hours. And I looked at him and said, I’m judging you, that’s a lot. And then I heard that number today, and it’s low.

Leo: It’s low.

Gina: One thing about L is that some of the notification changes, not to rewind, but  your notifications will now be in your lock screen. Which is really nice.

Leo: And the cards, you can swipe them away.

Gina: Yep. And L will run on exclusively on Art as well. So it will be a lot faster. Instead of Dalvick.

Leo: We didn’t mention Art. So, Dalvick, which is the just-in-time Java compiler, runtime, I should say that is used currently on Android. We saw Art when Kit Kat just came out. You can turn on your developer preferences and go in there and switch to Art. It had to recompile all the apps, so it was a fairly long switch-over. It didn’t work. You said you had problems with one app, I remember.

Gina: Ron actually switched over to Art and crashed his whole machine and it’s because What’s App actually wasn’t compatible with Art, which I’m sure it is now. L is exclusively on Art, which  just means it’s a lot faster, a lot smoother. And developers do not have to change anything to get that speed increase. They said two times speed increase over Dalvick. Better garbage collector…

Leo: I didn’t notice that with the pre-release Art. I didn’t notice any increase at all. And I have been using Art.

Gina: Right, because you switched over and you’ve been in there since? You’ve been Artified ever since.

Leo: Artified ever since. Once you go Art, you never go back.

Gina: And that’s full load at 64-bit compatibility which just means increased memory space. You just get a lot more memory and speed.

Leo: Dalvick is a just-in-time compiler. Which means, the way all of this work is that the code sits there. But right before it’s used it’s changed into a machine code. Or maybe Java, I don’t know. Turn it into something the machine can run. Art is an ahead-of-time compiler. Presumably, it goes through the apps and sort of pre-compiles the apps.

Gina: Right, when you compile a Java app, you actually get bite-code versus machine language. That’s why you have a Java runtime that then translates it into machine code. Art is just doing that faster.

Leo: So it takes the non-machine-specific dex codes and turns it into machine-specific code that can be run instantly. Presumably, things would go faster when that happens.

Gina: I didn’t mean to take us out of there.

Leo: Art has better garbage collection.

Gina: Better garbage collection. I’m all about better garbage collectors. Everyone was on the edge of their seat hoping that they would get better garbage collectors today. And we did! We got them.

Leo: Well apparently it’s not only a garbage collector but it’s going to be a garbage compactor. And I always wanted one of those. There will be garbage compaction. I’m reading it! I’m not making this stuff up! Anyway, Art is going to be on L.

Jeff: Compost code.

Leo: Yea. It’s recycling, not throwing out your bad memory pointers. Alright.

Gina: So sorry, let’s go back in.

Leo: I’ll make sure we get everything in the ad-release, in there. Android Wear, let’s talk about Android Wear. There is an STK available today that is a pre-release, or is it the final STK? Man, they’re close because we’ve already seen two watches. Alright so maybe it is final.

Gina: So what do they show? They showed step-by-step instructions to all the cooks. So if you’re cooking and you’ve got your watch on, you can swipe through and look at the stuff you’re working on. Which is nice. I’ve definitely splashed tomato sauce on my iPad, and had my phone lock when my hands were wet when I was cooking. Order a pizza from V-24, right from your watch. That was pretty cool.

Leo: Coincidentally, you can order the pizza and spill the tomato sauce.

Jeff: Maybe the pizza cook uses it.

Gina: They had order, hey Google, order me a car. Lift just knows where you are.

Jeff: Remind of, wake me up tomorrow. A lot of voice. Again, back to the cards being prioritized, so you can watch. The key to me is that this is now completely obsolete. I’ve always side.

Leo: He’s pointing to his Google Glass.

Jeff: This has three functions. Google Glass, the one thing that is not obsolete so far is being able to take a picture of what you see and share it. The two things that are obsolete are alerts and instructions. And the watch takes that over and does a better job of it. I can just get a glance of whatever alerts I have. I do not want the alerts coming in here. I’ve learned that. It doesn’t prioritize well enough, it can’t figure it out, it’s worthless. And in terms of instructions, if I’m in the car and I’m driving I want to use my actual phone as my GPS. If I’m walking, this is kind of dumb and I’m going to walk into a post. Turn left Jeff, on the watch works well.

Gina: The big use case you’re missing though going from the Glass to the watch is video. Hands-free video and taking pictures, right?

Jeff: That’s what I’m saying. That’s the thing that stays with this.

Leo: Not necessarily. The Samsung Gear 2 has a camera. You can say take a picture. It’s actually a pretty good camera.

Jeff: It’s ridiculous.

Leo: It’s no more ridiculous than using your Glass.

Jeff: This is the point.

Leo: You have some nerve saying it’s ridiculous.

Jeff: When Gina is looking at Eta doing something. Hey Eta, do that again. Hey Eta, here’s mommy.

Gina: It’s not quite hands-free, but…

Jeff: Here’s where this goes…

Gina: Go Pro shows that there are particular use cases for that.

Jeff: Glass becomes, there’s a camera that will be here, number one. Number two, it will have an indicator on to know when it’s on. Get rid of all this privacy whining. And number three, it will be a hell of a lot smaller, and be able to communicate with your phone.

Leo: I went zip lining with the Gear 2 watch. I had a Go Pro, and you’re right, for the video and so forth, the Go Pro. But you can’t really carry a camera when you’re zip lining, because your hands are busy. These are not bad pictures.

Jeff: My hands will be so sweaty…

Gina: Those are quite good. Those are much better than I would’ve expected.

Leo: I was actually somewhat pleased. I thought they came out quite well. By the way, there’s no reason to say the Android watch wouldn’t have a camera on it. Maybe you’ll keep the Glass so you can take pictures of Eta.

Jeff: Got to go visit.

Gina: But you don’t get that blink to take a picture, or take a video now.

Leo: That’s what gets people into trouble, with Glass.

Gina: You’re absolutely right. And you don’t want to do that unless you’re on a zip line, or your daughter’s about to take her first steps. They’re kind of special situations.

Leo: It needs to be a certain place, not a bar. Back to the L-word, I’m sorry one more thing. I just noticed somebody tweeted me. The guy who wrote the Google developer’s blog on material is Nicholas Gikoff. Alkor, the guy who did Quick Silver for the Macintosh and disappeared from the Quick Silver.

Gina: Alkor is at Google, that’s right.

Leo: He got a job at Google and now we know what he’s been working on, which is material design. So that’s pretty cool.

Gina: That is pretty cool. I still use and love Quick Silver.

Leo: I do too.

Gina: Very well-designed.

Leo: And he has a pretty good post about material design, what it means and how it integrates with Polymer, the toolkit for the web. Which basically gives you access to material design. So, sorry about that.

Jeff: Back to the wearables. An important thing about wearables is context, and how the wearable senses it and creates it. It creates context in the sense that I’m wearing my watch and I’m holding my phone. And my phone says I’m okay to be unlocked now. Hallelujah, right.

Leo: I did like that. That’s a nice feature. Taken from the Moto X, which senses Bluetooth and will unlock if you’re in a secure Bluetooth.

Jeff: I sense there’s a whole list of context that work both ways. My watch will know where I am. I’m near a port, I’ve got to tell you to get on the flight. I’ll prioritize the card, or my watch creates the context of saying Jeff’s near here because it’s his watch.

Leo: This is great. And this is something we’ve already seen nibbling the edge around. Moto X knows when you’re home, when you’re at work. There’s a program we’ve recommended, Agent, does the same thing on any Android device. It makes sense. When you’re at the store, reminders pop up saying don’t forget to buy milk. But it makes sense that a watch, this is a better place to put it on your wrist.

Jeff: So this becomes your authentication in the future, which is important.

Leo: That’s very interesting.

Jeff: For all the kinds of things. For walking into your house, for getting to unlock the devices, for billing things. If you’re wearing it, presumably you’re less likely to lose it. And, by the way, if you lose this… if these two things aren’t near each other, your phone and your watch, then each is going to say I’m lonely. I’m not going to work right now.

Leo: The Gear 2 does that as well. It not only notifies you, but you can search for your phone by pressing a button on your watch, or by pressing a button on your phone. Again, I feel Samsung is kind of with this second generation watch, kind of seeing the opportunities and these are obvious opportunities to anybody making these devices. It makes sense to be in an API for Android wear. We still haven’t answered the question of which you should get, the Gear or the G.

Jeff: The Samsung is called the what?
Leo: The Gear Live.

Gina: My take on it is I want the one that’s more stylish. Maybe I’m just more vain, but that’s the G-watch.

Leo: Did you look at peoples’ wrists carefully as they were on stage, because I think everyone of those watches was represented on stage.

Jeff: Well Sundar was wearing the round one and it looked a lot better.

Leo: I agree.

Gina: It looked big on him. It looked like a chunky watch on him. I don’t mind chunky watches so much. It definitely made me want the Moto the most. But between the G-watch and the Gear Live, I like the way the G-watch looks a little better. But I also like how Samsung has some experiences with watches.

Jeff: So Scene It has a preview up of the Gear Live.

Leo: Okay, let me find that. Because Samsung doesn’t have any information up. This looks a little bit nicer, frankly.

Jeff: It has a heart rate monitor. The cool thing about this one is the heart rate monitor.

Leo: I have to tell you, don’t get over-excited because these heart rate monitors on these watches have a basis in the Gear 2. Sorry, a Best Buy ad before we get to the review. But, they don’t work when you’re moving for one thing. So not really ideal for exercising.

Jeff: Well that will work well for me, because I’m stationary most of the time.

Leo: Well that’s good. If you’re sitting around, they’re the best. So the Gear 2 does it and so does the Basis watch. And they’re accurate in the right circumstances. Don’t get too sweaty, don’t move around too much. They don’t work very well. But I do think these replace the Fit Bit and the Fuel band and all of these simple pedometers. So here is the Scott Stine, senior editor, and that is the Samsung Gear Live. It looks very, I have to say, almost identical, minus the camera and the button to the Gear 2. Read messages, respond by voice, you can do that on the Gear 2. They’re big, but you want a big screen because you want to be able to read them.

Jeff: That’s true. What’s the recharging situation on these things?
Leo: I can tell you on the Gear 2, you have to dock it. I think it’s going to be the same here, this looks… on the back, identical.

Gina: How do you dock it?
Leo: Well I’ll show you. When he shows you the back, you see there’s contacts here. There’s four contacts. This is just like the Gear 2, it’s not too big. A little dock that slips on it, and that has the USB port.

Jeff: Just put a USB port in it.

Leo: They did say wireless charging on one of them.

Gina: It should be wireless. I don’t think you should make a watch that docks or a USB port.

Jeff: I wear my watch at night so I can see what time it is because I’m blind. If I have to take my watch off every night to charge it…

Leo: Yea, I think you have to.

Gina: And if you want to use it as an alarm.

Jeff: Well no, you tell your phone to be the alarm.

Gina: Right, the phone has to be the alarm. I dock my phone right next to my bed.

Leo: I think the LG is the one I would get. You’re going to get the Moto, right? LG at least has a page up. Let’s see if we can find out more about the G-watch. Choice of colors in black, titan, or white gold. You can customize the strap. Boy that’s big. I mean, I think from a distance they look identical. 400 MAH battery. And it says it will go a whole day on a single charge.

Jeff: This is a little bit of a G moment here.

Leo: It’s a computer on your wrist and it’s going 600 miles an hour! And there’s a toilet. So that’s all you need to know.

Jeff: This is pretty damn amazing.

Gina: It is, it’s pretty amazing.

Leo: This will work the G-watch, and I’m sure this is true of the Samsung, but the LG will work with any smart phone running Android 4.3 or better.

Jeff: By the way, 4.3 is a recent.

Leo: Well 4 is the current, right?

Gina: Yea, 4.4 just came down on yours, yea.

Leo: Kit Kat is current. But before that, Jelly Bean. That’s not the most recent.

Gina: And you’re right, I was having a moment, it doesn’t have wireless charge. What do you mean I have to plug it in!

Leo: If you go to g…

Jeff: Remember when we had to wind them! We had to change the date in the tiny thing there!

Leo: I knew somebody who used to… in fact I have quite a few of these that are called automatic watches that wind when you walk. And he had a device, because if you didn’t walk enough, you put the watch on it and it spins it around in a weird way and winds it up.

Gina: As if it were your gates or…?

Leo: That’s lazy.

Jeff: I think the rationale is that if you’re a collector.

Leo: Okay, so here, this is a little recursive. I went to g.co/wordcheck to see if my phone is compatible with Android wear, and it refers me to g.co/wordcheck. So maybe the page isn’t done yet. I don’t know. Anyway, this basically combines the features of the Pebble, with a fitness band of some kind. Google Now notifications.

Jeff: Do they all have the fitness stuff? They all have the same sensors?
Leo: I imagine. I mean, those are easy to implement. Heart rate is not so easy.

Gina: Yea, there’s a little star. Heart rate only available on watches with heart rate monitors.

Leo: Really? Interesting, I wonder what that means. You know, this is actually a good page if you go to android.com because it really demonstrates what the future of Android is. Powering screens of all sizes.

Gina: It was Android on every screen.

Leo: Right, that’s the future. Android wear on your watch, phones and tablets, Android TV, Android Car. So Android is the future, and that makes sense when Andy Ruben left to go run robots at Google. And Sundar took over, he’s the Chrome OS guy. All of a sudden, we suspect maybe this means there’s going to be some kind of unification. And I think that’s what’s happening, Android everywhere. And that makes sense from Google’s point of view. They’ve got a great product.

Gina: And they want the next billion people, and I think they have a shot at getting the next billion people online.

Jeff: Especially with a phone that costs less than $100.

Leo: Auto, I don’t know if there’s much to say about Auto. It’s a casting thing, which is also what Apple’s Carplay is. The Auto does not have Android built in to the Auto, any more than it has iOS built in to…

Jeff: Which I prefer, because I don’t want to have to say I’ll buy this car because literally if a car came literally with iOS, I wouldn’t buy it.

Leo: Well in five years, you don’t want to be looking at your car saying gee, you’re still Kit Kat. I wish you were the L-world.

Gina: The W-word at that point.

Leo: Right, who knows what dessert will be by then. The way they demoed it with that cut down Kia Soul, was cable. And I think that makes sense you can’t get a full screen like this fast enough in Bluetooth. So you’re going to have to connect a special cable so your car will have to have it. They did say, there are a lot of cars in this alliance. A lot of manufacturers.

Jeff: Surprisingly, no Toyota.

Leo: Yea, I thought that was odd. Did you see Honda?

Jeff: If you scroll through the page, yea, Honda’s there. Wait, Abarth?

Leo: Abarth, I love the Abarth. It has a scorpion for the logo. Bentley too, so you got to be happy about that. Acura, Audi, Chevrolet, Chrysler… Ford, Honda, Hyundai, Infiniti, Jeep, Kia, Mazzerati, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Opal. My first car was an Opal Cadet.

Jeff: Really? You were a dork!

Leo: Ram, Rinot, Seat. Subaru, Suzuki, Volkswagen, and Volvo.

Jeff: So what’s missing from that?

Leo: Well you said Toyota’s the big one.

Gina: Tesla is not there.

Leo: But GM, in the guise of Chevrolet. But not another… oh I guess there’s Chrysler. So GM and Ford, they’ve got the big three U.S. automakers. They’ve got Volkswagen, Audi, that’s good. So in other words, big. I don’t see Peugeot, or anything. But, I think I like the idea. Kevin Marks was unhappy with the screen. He said why would they waste space at the bottom of the screen for those icons on a 16:9 screen. They should put them on the left. I think that’s pretty standard. I think that’s what people expect in a car. And remember, you’re listening to the directions not watching them on the screen. There was a lot more touching that I…

Jeff: On the music, it was far more touching. That’s going to get a lot of torture out there because now we have the Feds wanting to regulate phone GPS. So they’re going to come into this too, and they’re going to regulate anything you can do in a car.

Leo: I have to say, at least on my phones, I’m able to use Google Speech to say listen to Lana Del Ray and it will play music. I can say launch Audible, and it will launch the Audible app. I think most of what we can do can be done by voice.

Jeff: Until you’re in the app.

Leo: Yea, once you’re in the app, you can’t navigate it.

Jeff: But they have written the directions app, and messaging apps to be able to work. So that will be a next phase I think.

Leo: And some big app partners, Spotify, Stitcher, Mono. Pandora, IHeartRadio, Songza, Major League Baseball. So they’ve got app partners.

Gina: And in the demo, they did he Okay Google, what time does the museum open till. And then Google responded and he said well can you take me there? Navigate to there. So you have that conversational Google voice search going on. So I was impressed by that.

Leo: They also showed that on the watch by the way. You can actually use the watch to steer around. So this makes sense. And I guess what Google’s saying is, we’re agnostic. You can have Android everywhere. You can wear it, you can put it on your TV. Let’s talk a little about the TV. I wasn’t exactly sure how this worked.

Jeff: I’m not either.

Leo: I gathered that Sony and Sharp will announce 4K TVs later this year that will have Android TV built in. But more importantly, I got the sense it will work with ChromeCast.

Gina: Yes, well you can cast from anything that’s cast-compatible. So any tab on your computer or any app on your phone that has the cast button will cast to Android TV.

Jeff: They separated Google Cast from Chrome Cast.

Leo: I could even cast my entire Android interface, right?

Gina: Right, you can cast your screen.

Jeff: But that’s to ChromeCast. There’s a separation here between Android TV and ChromeCast.

Leo: I think Google Cast is the casting technology.

Gina: Right, Google Cast is the technology. But to say that something’s Google, I think they use the term cast-ready apps. I think it means you can stream out the media to either ChromeCast and also Android TV.

Leo: It also looked like they were going to encourage a lean-back experience for apps. So that if I cast the app to a screen 10 feet away, it would have a lean-back interface. So right now the way that ChromeCast works, is that the interface is always on the phone or the tablet, and not on the screen. The screen just gets the content. It looks like I’ll be able to control the screen from the phone and have an interface. So I can search Netflix on the screen, but use the phone… I’m not sure exactly how that’s going to work.

Jeff: Tell me if I’m wrong, but this is important. They did not make a box. They did not make a round globe. So that means they have a very limited install pool, of two manufacturers, both Japanese not Koreans by the way, who are the big ones.

Leo: Well you’re not going to see Samsung because they have their own platforms.

Jeff: This is the one that under wells me most.

Leo: Google struggled with TV. They did the Google TV, which was arguably a flop, even though LG adopted it. A Korean company.

Jeff: But now they’re going to do the same thing. Now they’re going to the manufacturers. So if I wanted to marrow across all the TVs in my house, and I have many…

Leo: I don’t think that’s the play. I think that’s a possible one, but I think ChromeCast is the play. And if they can use ChromeCast…

Jeff: But all that functionality … I'm not so sure. All that functionality they showed, you, I don't think that came with Chromecast. All that lean back and control the TV …

Gina: Yes. The search interface …

Jeff: Is that Chromecast?

Gina: No, no.

Jeff: No. That's not.

Leo: I felt like that was unclear.

Jeff: No.

Gina: No, you might be right. No, you're right. It was unclear. You're right. They kind of breezed over it.

Jeff: Chromecast is a whole separate thing. This was for a Google TV, an Android TV, rather.

Leo: That was my question mark. I didn't understand what did what.

Jeff: I could be wrong, but I think that's the case.

Leo: So they hope obviously to get manufacturers to adopt this and build in the set top boxes. Build it into TVs …

Jeff: But that's a big … Once you're there, the interface was fascinating too because it really brought search. And I don't really want to necessarily look for … just give me academy award winning movies in 2012; I could care less. But the fact that I can browse through choices rather than through schedules. That I can ask for a show and get a show. That's a search motif brought to entertainment. That's important, but not if you don't have an installed base it's not.

Gina: Right.

Leo: Well, furthermore when he did the search, he searched for Breaking Bad, which I know is available on Netflix and Amazon. And it only showed Google Play store.

Gina: Right.

Leo: I do hope that that search will be cross-provider.

Gina: Well I hope that …

Leo: Amazon's Fire is not, by the way. The Fire TV, when you do a search, it shows it on Amazon and not anywhere else. And that's really what we want, isn't it – a cross content provider service?

Gina: Right.

Jeff: I think they said it would show anything you have installed.

Leo: Okay. That would be good.

Jeff: So if you had Netflix installed and it was available there, I think they said … Does that sound familiar?

Gina: Would Netflix have to expose that to them? Is it possible that Netflix would have to expose their content?

Leo: I would expect it. How would you search it otherwise?

Gina: How would you search it otherwise, right? Now, I'm confusing a couple different things …

Jeff: TiVo. TiVo does that. So when I search on my TiVo it does a cross … Hulu Plus, Amazon, Netflix, and it will show my Xfinity On Demand, and it will show where those shows live on all those platforms.

Gina: It seems like that's the only reasonable answer.

Leo: That's what you want.

Gina: Yeah.

Leo: So I'm looking at the developer's page. Designing for TV. Smart TVs powered by Android. So that tells you it's something that you're going to build in. Bring your favorite Android apps to the best screen in your house. Thousands of apps are already optimized for TVs. This is how Google TV worked. You'd install an app that was for Google TV on the TV.

Gina: Right.

Leo: And then for developers it had optimize your layout for the TV screen. I did love it that when he was showing the Android device it showed it in portrait mode. And then he turned the phone to show Dark Sky or whatever and it went to wide screen. It went to landscape.

Gina: Yeah, that was nice.

Leo: That's what it should do, and that's nice.

Gina: Yeah, so the SDK provides fragments, which is the Android speak or developer speak for UI elements that make your app sort of TV compatible. So it sounds like this preview SDK lets you provide layouts for the TV if someone puts your app on the TV and also exposes your content to the search results as well.

Leo: Okay.

Gina: So if you've got media in your app … so yeah, help users find your content quickly with in-app searching. So in-app searching.

Leo: Great. That's nice. He was using a game controller on the TV; that's also built into Android TV, as is support for game controllers. That's nice.

Jeff: In Twitter Ben Swan says that ASUS and Razr are making Android TV set top boxes.

Leo: Yeah, he did mention Razr and ASUS or something … So the API comes out … or the SDK comes out tomorrow if you want to start developing for TV. And I would hope we get some clarification. Maybe on the Google blog.

Gina: At this point Google developers have to feel sort of burned by the original Google TV, by the queue …

Leo: Queue.

Gina: The queue, we never really had a chance to develop for. Chromecast has been a success … but it's been a slow … apps have been adding Chromecast support slowly.

Leo: I'd like to see this capability through the Chromecast because that would basically enable any TV to do it. It's a better way to do it.

Gina: Right. If all this functionality was built into existing Chromcast devices, and, yeah. It's true. It's true. I'd love to see that too.

Leo: Um, it's Sarah Prez writing at TechCrunch says that this will … the update to the Chromecast will introduce an Airplay-like Android mirroring feature … photo backdrops … I like those.

Gina: Yeah, that was really nice.

Leo: You can have your weather now. You can have a variety of photos.

Gina: Right, so this is Chromecast-specific updating that … the nice thing about the marriage between Android TV and Chromecast, and they made this point, that as Chromecast gets better, as casting gets better, as they get better at memory and speeding it up, that will also improve Android TV, which is nice. The Chromecast updates were awesome, so you can put your own pictures as the backdrop, which is really nice, and you can mirror your screen, which is also really cool.

Jeff: The fact that you don't have to be on the same wifi network.

Leo: Google's going to mediate that, which is kind of cool.

Jeff: My dream right off the bat is that every hotel room in America or in the world should have a Chromecast.

Gina: Right, so you walk in the room and you just … it's on and whatever and you don't have to be on a hotel network at all.

Leo: That solves that. That was one of the reasons you didn't bring your Chromecast around …

Jeff: You couldn't do it because of the wifi.

Gina: The wifi would be all funky.

Leo: But you don't need to anymore … Bring your Chromecast with you. You can plug it into any HDMI port; you can now use it.

Jeff: But Google would be very smart to do a deal with the hotel chain.

Leo: They don't need to, because …

Jeff: Because Chromecast is so big.

Leo: Bring your Chromecast.

Gina: Jeff was saying that every TV should have it plugged in, and have it already …

Jeff: It should …

Gina: Yes …

Leo: And it should …

Gina: And what does this remind you of? This immediately made me think about the Nexus Q. Like echoes of the Q. Remember that feature with Q if your friends came over and they had their Android devices they could also send their playlist to the Q? It's this idea of like social flinging.

Leo: Right. Social flinging. It's what monkeys do.

Gina: Yeah, social digital flinging.

Leo: Yeah.

Gina: And uh so I was like, All right the Q kind of lives on a little bit.

Jeff: Well that was a really good point you made in Twitter, Gina. That you see the antecedents, the descendants of the dead  … these come back alive … and the best ideas … and they really do use them. Things from Wave, things from Q.

Gina: Yeah, so many Wave things and you see the social thing from Q. You know, you saw so many things that failed in Buzz have showed up in Google+ although I admit that Google+ hasn't been the most successful. It certainly didn't have the spotlight today. But yeah, I mean Google's failures are public but they obviously inform the next generation. I saw a lot of folks kind of snarking on Twitter, you know, like Oh, what about this, what about Glass, what about Google+ and everything they talked about last year doesn't exist this year, and I think that sort of the ghosts of the old stuff that didn't work really informed the new work. And I like that. It's messy; it's evolution. Versus the big reveal of the perfectly polished product.

Leo: But this is how the real world works.

Gina: Yes.

Leo: And you're going to get a better product if you try it in a variety of ways. At least Google continues to try it, and you know …

Jeff: It's a startup world. Startups fail. Things fail. It's a company of many startups, and they …

Leo: They're not embarrassed to say, Hey you know, we're never gonna sell the Q.

Jeff: You know and I think it's all forgiven when you have Cardboard.

Leo: I love Cardboard. You think this is a little bit of a knock on the Oculus Rift? You think, Hey, we're going to give you some Cardboard. Put your phone in here. And it does exactly the same thing, only better.

Jeff: Not only that, but it's also a knock on Amazon, because who needs 3D on your phone?

Gina: Right. There is a little bit of that.

Jeff: Yeah, it's both.

Leo: It contains magnets. Be careful.

Jeff: Why are the magnets there? There's a magnet right there.

Gina: I'm not clear on why that magnet is there. It must anchor the phone …

Leo: Tells the phone something?

Jeff: It must. A rubber band, the magnet and some glue.

Gina: Some Velcro.

Jeff: Some Velcro.

Leo: It's the strangest thing. It's so weird.

Gina: Yep.

Leo: Well I'm glad to have one actually. Thank you for bringing it.

Gina: Oh sure.

Leo: And we should check eBay because I'm wondering if …

Jeff: I checked at the beginning of the show. Let's just see if it's there.

Leo: What are you searching for? Cardboard?

Jeff: Yeah. Google Cardboard. Right? No?

Gina: Yeah, I was chatting with a Googler a little bit last night and was saying that you know, there's still these two product lines. The Chrome line and the Android line. They both exist, and I think it could still be a source of confusion, if not for consumers then certainly for developers. You have the two open source platforms that still seem to be hooked into one another but still solving the same problems and what's going on, and he said, You know, I think the idea was that one of them would really succeed and the other wouldn't, but it turned out that they both really succeeded. So, you know, we're keeping them around. We know that it's a potential source of confusion, but they're both doing so  well in solving problems. So now I think you know what we saw, another takeaway from today, was this marriage between Chrome and Android. I think they're starting to come together.

Jeff: I mean, Android is not a browser.

Gina: Yeah.

Jeff: Chrome is a browser, but now, what we didn't talk about before, the fact that in your recents, on the phone, it mixes in web pages and applications.

Gina: Yep. A tab is considered a singular activity.

Jeff: And in search, you can go in and one of the results of the search is going to be an app that you happen to have. So apps are Android; Chrome is the web, and they are now starting to mix in. So this whole idea in my world of media is, well, either the web is dead and we're all going to have apps, or if nobody downloads and runs the apps, we're all web. And in Google they're mixed in.

Leo: What did you think of, and did you understand, the Chromebook integration with Android? Tell me, I don't even know …

Jeff: You laughed when I set down my Chromebook.

Gina: That was nutty. So we were exhausted at that point. It was really pretty late. Because they were running Android apps … you were really keyed into this.

Jeff: Yes I was.

Gina: Jeff was, like, so excited next to me. I could feel the excitement.

Leo: Well this could be huge.

Jeff: If I understand it.

Gina: So they're running Android apps.

Jeff: They're running Android apps on Chrome. Now mind you, I already have Dropbox.

Leo: Is it a Chrome extension? So he showed Evernote. He had Evernote on his phone, and it was somehow on his … now was that because he installed it as a Chrome extension?

Jeff: I think there must be some kind of run time Android on here that makes it run.

Gina: There's gotta be, right?

Jeff: But what it means is that I can put, again, the phone becomes the center of everything, so I can show on the TV or on my laptop, Android. If I have an app that I like and I like the way it operates I can now run it on my Chromebook. Now, it's Chromebook; it's not Chrome; it's not other operating systems; it's just this operating system. But they're properly proud of the Chromebook success.

Leo: So he showed Vine, which is not available on the Chromebook.

Jeff: Right.

Gina: Right.

Leo: And it looked like it was the Vine. It was the aspect ratio of a phone screen.

Jeff: I'm wondering about … can I finally get Microsoft's phone service, Skype.

Leo: Skype too would be one of them. Uh, does it, do you have to go to the Chrome store and install …

Jeff: They weren't clear about that.

Gina: Yeah, they said that it's still the early days and of course you know I think the Pixel is still the only touch screen …

Jeff: No, no, I think there are other touch screens.

Gina: There are others, oh, there are others.

Leo: We talked about that, that you could use the TrackPad to do touch.

Gina: Yes.

Leo: So it would work. They showed Flipboard, which is also not on Chrome, I don't think.

Jeff: Right. Right.

Gina: Right. Flipboard, Evernote and Vine. They showed … It can show in a kind of tall cone shaped size.

Jeff: Yeah, so what this does, it strengthens Chrome because you can get tons more apps on Chrome now. It strengthens the link between Android and Chrome, which was my point earlier that they were becoming much better integrated. And it says that mobile is preeminent (unintelligible).

Leo: So they were not at all clear about the mechanics but am I gathering that the idea is you will then see an app in the Chrome … I don't understand.

Gina: Yeah, I don't understand either, right, it sounds like, so …

Leo: Will there be a separate app store for Chromebooks that is Android apps? Will …

Jeff: That's a good question. Because it said, Some of your favorite apps … it didn't say that all apps will suddenly run …

Leo: You do have to love the idea that you can unlock the Chromebook by getting near it with your Android phone.

Gina: Yeah, that's cool.

Leo: Because typing in my 20 character … no, it's a 32 character Google password every time … it's a real pain in the butt.

Jeff: Well and I always get really frustrated on my phone too when I want to get to my cards … right? So the fact that they're thinking that way. (Unintelligible) that authentication stuff …

Leo: Chrome will also show notifications from your phone. But we use Pushbullet, something you recommend and I really like. And that's doing that all the time on all my devices.

Gina: Yep. I like it a lot. There was one point at which I said, Oh yeah, I got a notification on my Chrome OS that my battery was running low and it was such a delightful experience. And I turned to Jeff and said, That's never a delightful experience. Never delightful to hear that your battery is running out.

Jeff: It's a Chrome extension that allows for the downloading of Android apps. Says Android Central.

Gina: It looked like it was running in a Hangouts-like window on the screen. So it sounds like it was some extension.

Leo: Now, Chromebooks are Intel, right? Or are they Android, or ARM? Are they ARM or are they Intel? That's an Intel device, isn't it?

Gina: I think it's Intel. There was a little robot dressed in an Intel outfit.

Leo: So the apps are going to have to run in a virtual machine …

Jeff: Hold on. Hold on. I just referred to something … a rather geeky way to do it … in 2012. So never mind. Never mind.

Leo: They're talking about BluesStacks probably. But BlueStacks is an emulator, so BlueStacks lets you run Android apps on Windows or Mac.

Gina: It's got to be some sort of emulator.

Leo: It's got to be something like BlueStacks, I would think. But I'm not clear.

Gina: Unless it's casting from your phone, which is not …

Jeff: No no no. It was running.

Gina: It was running.

Jeff: It was running. But it was an odd thing to spend time on.

Leo: If they made a version of ART that ran on Intel … ART's the run time, right? Then you could take an APK and just run it. Right?

Gina: Yeah. Well …

Jeff: Except for different calls.

Gina: Well, you'd need the Android layer.

Leo: There's going to have to be a wine like layer of Android calls. Otherwise it wouldn't work.

Gina: Yeah, Jason Howell during the keynote was saying, Android laptop? And he's like, Oh, this is basically it.

Leo: But with all the benefits of a Chromebook.

Gina: Right.

Jeff: Which are many, by the way.

Leo: I know. I've come around, you know. For education …

Jeff: You fricassee that crow well, sir.

Leo: Anywhere you don't want to be able to have your user do anything, a Chromebook is an excellent choice.

Jeff: I do everything … more than a year now … more than …

Leo: A great struggle.

Jeff: No it's not.

Leo: Are you still using Crownut?

Jeff: No, I gave that up.

Leo: What is it called? Not Crownut.

Jeff: Crouton. No, because I couldn't get Netflix.

Leo: No Netflix on Crouton.

Jeff: But now on Chrome you can download movies and shows. More than a year, this has been my machine.

Gina: It's interesting that they use the Amazon sales rankings as their sort of pride about these things. There was actually a lot of other companies …

Leo: They said the Chromebooks represent, what, the top ten?

Gina: In the top ten of the highest rated laptops on Amazon. And there's a lot of that, right? They talked about the Twitter, Deverald Group gave them access to the streaming API for them to show the Google cloud live stuff. There were a few mentions of Samsung contributing their Knox stuff to Android L … There was the mention of Amazon …

Jeff: They were friendly. Twitter. Twitter, I mean that was peace right there.

Gina: Yeah. Right.

Jeff: But while we're talking about other companies, let us have a moment to curse Verizon.

Leo: Now what?

Jeff: Because when people bought the …

Leo: Oh, this is a bad one … and Google had to make this good.

Jeff: Google had to make it good and it wasn't Google's fault. Verizon …

Leo: When I spent 1,400 dollars on my Pixel Chromebook I got lifetime …

Jeff: No. Yeah, lifetime, or two years … two years. Two years.

Leo: A certain amount of data from Verizon.

Jeff: 100 mgs a month. Not much, but it was, you know, when you're in a pinch, you got it. Then Verizon started cutting off at a year, saying, F you to all of their customers. Because that's what we do. We're Verizon.

Leo: Wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Jeff: They just cut it off.

Leo: They said, We're not going to give you two years after all?

Jeff: Yeah, they started stopping it. And the customers didn't know, and suddenly their year comes up cause it's about now for a lot of people, and they just stopped. And so … I know I'm shrieking.

Leo: What's wrong with you?

Jeff: Well, a lot of things. So then Google is giving out 150 dollar gift certificates.

Leo: Well that's going to cost them, like 1,500 bucks.

Jeff: Hey, hey, hey.

Leo: You mean every single person who bought a Chromebook will get 150 dollars?

Jeff: Only the Chromebook LTE.

Leo: Oh. Like I said, it's going to cost them 1,500 dollars. That's thousands they're going to be out.

Gina: Ha ha. Breaking chops, as usual, folks.

Leo: Seriously, how many people do you think they're going to write a check to?

Jeff: Not many.

Leo: Seriously.

Jeff: But Verizon … why? Why?

Leo: What's wrong with Verizon? I agree.

Jeff: Well, a lot.

Leo: That's not nice. Not nice, Verizon. Uh, they did bury a lot of nuggets, and I have to say, I felt like they were crumbs. Things like, Well, we bought Quickoffice, so now you can use Google Docs and edit …

Gina: Native docs, yeah.

Jeff: Native … Native Office. Native Office, a good deal.

Jeff: They turned Microsoft into an API that they just cut into.

Leo: They also said if you … now this is a little bit of a fudge … they said ten bucks for unlimited data for Google Drive if you use Google Drive for business. What they didn't mention is that that's only if five of you buy Google Drive for business at ten bucks each. Otherwise if just one of you buys it it's just a terabyte. But in fact a terabyte is a lot.

Gina: Yeah, oh yeah.

Leo: They certainly are and have been undercutting the prices.

Jeff: Well there was two angles in terms of going after the work audience. One was being able to have a work partition on your phone, and two was …

Leo: That was the thanks to Knox by Samsung.

Jeff: Right. And two was being able to use docs … the added functionality to drive …

Leo: Office docs.

Gina: Right.

Jeff: In terms of Office, it was more security, and storage, to try to encourage more companies. And the percentages, the number of colleges that have gone Google, was really impressive.

Gina: It was high. Colleges and universities were the highest. So they broke out Fortune 500, colleges and universities, and startups. Now if you had told me that I would have said that obviously startups, you know the highest percentage of you know groups that have gone Google, I would have said startups. It wasn't. It was universities. Right?

Leo: I think they said the University of Colorado is Google.

Jeff: Yeah. We're trying to switch at CUNY.

Gina: Oh, wow.

Jeff: Well, Sarah Bartlett, my dean, growls at me every time she can't do Adatrace … and now you can.

Leo: Well, now we should be happy. Redline is moving to Boston.

Jeff: The boss is going to be happy.

Gina: Redline. And gosh, there's a lot here …. I mean it was fine, but they could have caught … they need a tougher editor.

Jeff: They needed their cards to be prioritized.

Leo: This is I think where the structure of Google really hurts them because they're trying to keep everybody within an entrepreneurial spirit and create a feeling of autonomy. But then what happens is, and you can see this, it must have happened, is that the call went out. All right, Who wants to present at IO? Me! Me! Me! Okay, who … and then they did some sort of process.

Gina: Yeah.

Leo: And what they got was mud.

Jeff: Should we start on the list of what wasn't there though?

Leo: Well, number one, I didn't see any Google Glass.

Jeff: No.

Leo: I saw Glassholes.

Gina: Lots of people wearing Glass. No Googlers wearing Glass.

Leo: Although they did update Glass today. They have a new version of Glass that has 2 gigabytes of RAM. You're not going to get it.

Jeff: I don't use 10 megabytes on my glasses, because I don't use them.

Leo: But if I were an explorer I would feel … well, you know what, if you became an explorer you understood, well, this is a beta program.

Gina: Yes.

Leo: This is not going to be the final. So they've doubled the RAM. And you're not going to get it.

Jeff: But … so they just put it on sale in the UK. Would you invest in it now? When they didn't brag about it? They didn't do anything about it.

Leo: No.

Jeff: No. Sorry. Nice people. Nice, interesting technology. A lot of things done. I go back to what I said before. Three functions. I always said this. I always said this. And I also said, This is to the iPhone what … this is whatever follows, if what Newton was to the iPhone.

Leo: Newton. Yeah.

Jeff: That was the Newton.

Leo: Twelve new apps, including Shazam, so you can say, Okay, Glass recognizes song.

Jeff: I can pull out my phone and do it. But … okay, Glass.

Leo: A basketball training aid. You need to get a specially equipped basketball. And you throw it, and then you get the little feedback after each shot.

Jeff: It went in, or it didn't go in. I can tell that now. It never goes in. I got it.

Leo: You have to make sure you throw it harder.

Gina: You have to make sure you get the arc. The perfect arc.

Leo: Arc. Your release is poorly timed. Sssshhhhh. Maybe it will say: ssshhhhhhhh.

Gina: Yes.

Jeff: Put that sensor in a golf ball and it will sell.

Leo: You know what?

Gina: They should go for the golf ball crowd, versus the basketball crowd. They've got more money to spend on Glass.

Jeff: You're more isolated on a golf course. Nobody is going to see you look like a dork.

Leo: Right.

Jeff: You already do look like a dork with what you're wearing.

Leo: I think there are a lot of Glassholes wearing tasseled shoes and Glass out there on the links.

Jeff: I can see that, yeah. And maybe you could get driving directions for your cart. I can see it, yeah.

Leo: Also, nothing about Google+.

Jeff: Let's stay there for a second.

Leo: Did last year they talk about Google+?

Jeff: Oh, yeah.

Leo: Yeah, we were very excited. I remember.

Gina: Yeah.

Jeff: Yeah, Vic was talking.

Leo: And Bradley Horowitz was there and I remember him saying they …

Jeff: We saw Bradley last week.

Gina: And then they did events and I mean there was a lot of , a lot of … was that when they redesigned the app?

Jeff: Yep, there was not a, not a word …

Gina: Not a word about it.

Jeff: Not a syllable. And I've been arguing that .. you know, I'm one of the ones that holds out and I like Google+ and people make fun of me and all that, but now I …

Leo: We all still use it here. I would say that in the brick house it's our number one social network by far.

Jeff: One thing I heard from somebody who talked to a Googler was that they're going to start splitting up Google+. And this, this is forth hand, so who knows? But the argument is, if you look at what you can do with photos in Google+, it's incredible.

Gina: It is.

Jeff: But nobody knows it, because it's inside Google+.

Leo: It's buried. Buried.

Jeff: And I made this point on the show a couple weeks ago. Zuckerberg talking about breaking up the Big Blue app. He doesn't care. If you're using WhatsApp then use WhatsApp. It's fine. I own it now. He's not trying to integrate it into everything. Google does not have one big portal app you use. It has an underlying user database across a bunch of different functions. So they broke that rule when it came to Google+.

Gina: Yeah.

Jeff: I think Google+ is an underlying database of relationships that brings relevance to you across many different functions. And if you want to do photos now, then do a great photo function. If you want to talk to people who are on Google+, go do that.

Gina: Right. Right.

Jeff: Hangouts? Go do that.

Gina: Photos and Hangouts are great. Those are the aspects of Google+ that I use every day. But I wouldn't say that I use Google+. I mean, it's really kind of, it's a marketing problem. Right? You say Google+ and people think you're talking about the social network. But it's really an umbrella to a ton of different products.

Jeff: Yeah.

Gina: Just use the profiles and sign into YouTube to comment, right? I mean …

Leo: Just because they didn't mention it at a developer event doesn't mean that they're not using it.

Jeff: Oh, they know that there's a (unintelligible) though.

Leo: Yeah.

Jeff: They know that. They didn't mention any Nexus phones, they didn't show any Nexus phones, they didn't develop any Nexus phones. They didn't mention it. They didn't mention Glass. They didn't mention Google+.

Gina: I'm not sure they didn't say Nexus.

Jeff: But we, we're the Kremlinologists.

Leo: Right. Well, uh …

Jeff: And so what else was not there?

Leo: What else was not there?

Jeff: So Nexus, voice, search …

Leo: Google+. Can I just point out that last year they did that great search thing. The search for the Golden Gate Bridge …

Jeff: There were search functions on TV.

Gina: Yeah, they showed the material design in the search interface …

Jeff: But they didn't enhance the functionality of the search in any way.

Gina: Right, but they did, they did do, like, the museum, and how do I get there. So there was a reinforcement of the conversational search.

Leo: All right. They showed really how search is being used in a modern …

Gina: They showed links to your apps in Android, right?

Jeff: All right. Okay.

Gina: So, you know, an open table link.

Jeff: What else was missing here in our chat room …

Leo: That's cool. Actually I really liked that. I think the process communication was great.

Gina: Uh, search. When you search for the Tor in Google Earth, when you search for something you've done in an app, and it said here's the Tor.

Jeff: Oh right. That's true.

Gina: But that was search on the phone. It wasn't actually a Google search. I liked that.

Leo: Didn't mention ads in any way. AdWords. AdSense.

Jeff: No. No phones or tablets. Nothing in terms of making them or anything new coming.

Gina: Right.

Jeff: Which we've really been wondering about.

Gina: And no new Chromebooks. Or Chromeboxes.

Leo: Yeah, hardware was really scarce.

Gina: It was.

Jeff: Yeah, and all this talk … well, part of the talk yesterday was Nest is taking over much of the hardware.

Leo: Well in fact, no mention of Nexus phones?

Jeff: Or Nest.

Leo: Or tablets. Or Nest, even.

Gina: Or Nest, yeah.

Jeff: You even know they have a (unintelligible) thing, no examples about Nest. Nothing.

Leo: When Google bought Dropcam, really it was Nest that bought Dropcam. And that's how it was pitched, even though Nest is a wholly owned subsidiary of Google. So maybe that's interesting. Tony Fadell will be the guy to run your hardware program, I guess. Um, no mention of robots.

Jeff: Well there was, but from the protester.

Leo: Only from the protester. Um, now is there another keynote tomorrow? I don't think that there is.

Gina: There is not.

Leo: In the past, they've split it up into two. The rest of Google IO, much like WWDC, is developer sessions.

Gina: Yeah.

Jeff: And some, you know, blue sky, wacky wonderful things about life in computers and things.

Gina: And there are announcements …

Leo: Do you hear any Gmail at all, or Gmail encryption?

Jeff: No, and that was the other thing. If Larry had come to talk, which would have been five hours longer, the question I wanted to ask was about security.

Gina: Well they addressed it a little bit with the enterprise stuff, right? Encryption both ways.

Leo: Right. Separating your personal stuff on your phone from your business stuff.

Gina: Right.

Jeff: But that's not again, NSA … kind of the security …

Gina: And they showed the Gmail interface redesign, but no, they really didn't talk about … with the exception of the Knox stuff and the enterprise stuff, they didn't talk about security too much.

Leo: Right.

Gina: Now, this is the part I think where you cut off. They went to the Google cloud platform stuff, which was pretty heavy developer … yeah, it was kind of a snooze even for me, and I'm a developer …

Jeff: (Unintelligible) because it was a developer's conference, so that was okay.

Gina: No, it was hour three at that point. But then the Google Play, the woman from Google Play got up, and talked about Appurify. They announced the acquisition.

Leo: They acquired … what is Appurify?

Gina: Appurify is an app that helps you test your Android apps across a bunch of different devices. To do real world testing. So it's basically helping developers deal with the fragmentation issue, and not having a massive collection of every size screen and variety of device. She mentioned Google Fit. Which I was surprised that they didn't talk about during the Android Wear section.

Jeff: Yeah.

Gina: Okay. So it's a single set of APIs to manage fitness data. And it blends data from multiple apps and devices, and we saw a few examples. I think Noom was the app, a weight loss app, that was up on screen. That connects to your wi thing … do you say Withings things or wee things?

Leo: I say Withings, but I don't know what the right pronunciation is.

Gina: Uh, Nike Fuel is going to be integrating with Google Fit. I saw RunKeeper.

Jeff: Just as Nike gives up its devices …

Gina: Yeah. I thought that …

Jeff: Fuel, it's an odd, it's a meaningless currency. What it tries to do, Fuel tries to bring all activity into one kind of point structure. So does this (pointing at his wrist device). So does the Misfit whatchamacallit.

Gina: Yeah, what's that thing again?

Jeff: Uh, oh, it's the Misfit.

Gina: It's the Fitbit.

Jeff: No no no no no. I lost the …

Leo: Swift?

Jeff: It's called the Misfit …

Leo: I like it.

Jeff: It works nice, yeah.

Leo: Yeah, I like it.

Gina: Yeah.

Leo: It looks like you're an Egyptian god. Or something.

Jeff: Is it masculine enough?

Leo: It's masculine. Very, very masculine.

Jeff: Shouldn't carry a murse though.

Leo: We aren't, we're not going to do a change log, I guess.

Gina: This is the Change Log.

Jeff: This is the change log.

Leo: These are the change logs.

Jeff: Uh, here's a list on the rundown of things that were not brought up.

Leo: Things that were not. Ten of them, from ReadWrite web. Ten things Google did not talk about at Google IO.

Gina: Android Silver.

Leo: Silver. So they didn't mention Nexus but they didn't mention anything else, in terms of Google devices.

Gina: And Android One was the device mentioned, right? The low power …

Leo: Right. But that, they're not even going to make that. That's just a platform for people. Others who are going to make it.

Gina: Right.

Leo: Um, they didn't mention Android Nearby, which is a proximity service from Google. That was rumored to be announced at IO. Kind of like iBeacon. Uh, Glass, Nexus, Project Ara and Project Tango …

Gina: Project Tango …

Jeff: Project Tango … we dashed out of there to get here, but there's a booth for Tango.

Gina: I'm sure there's a booth. And I'm sure there's going to be something on Ara. I wouldn't be surprised if they gave away some Ara kits.

Leo: Ara is the Motorola research project where there's a modular phone. Tango is the mobile 3D machine vision project.

Gina: You know in developer's sessions sometimes they give out little kits, just to people who are in that one session, if you're lucky enough to …

Leo: Sure. Yeah. Uh, Chrome OS updates, Nest and Android Home. We thought there would be a lot more mention of Home.

Jeff: Yeah, they had a couch and I thought it was …

Leo: Home and health.

Gina: Yeah yeah, they had a Couch up on stage and we thought, Oh, this is … felt like a Nexus Q demo throwback.

Leo: Last year they gave us Android Studio. They didn't really mention that, although they had a lot of developer tools that worked with Studio, including, you know, real time online debugging, which is pretty cool.

Gina: Uh huh.

Leo: And Google+, so that's pretty much, pretty much what they didn't say. But I didn't feel like it was missing because I didn't feel like this was in any way an attempt to make a state of the world address.

Gina: And the fact that Larry Page didn't show up.

Jeff: No Larry …

Leo: He was there in the front row. We saw a picture of him.

Jeff: Oh, I didn't know he was there.

Leo: Yeah, he was there. But didn't say anything, as he did last year. Maybe wisely. He probably was advised by people: Don't mention the island that you want to be on. Can't we all just get along …

Gina: Ha ha ha ha.

Leo: That just didn't play too well. But I think having the CEO speak is important. That's one thing you see at all the other companies' events. The CEO does speak. And kind of sets the tone. And I think he's missing. I think Larry is very shy and very hands off. Maybe not in one to one settings, but in a setting like this.

Gina: Right.

Jeff: I think that this was a year of them better developing their platforms. And bringing them together, and making sense of them, and revealing and enforcing principles of design.

Leo: Our show today brought to you by our friends at hover.com. One of the things that Google announced is that they're going to become a domain registrar.

Jeff: Uh huh.

Leo: But there's some weird little things in there that you may think, I can do better. For one of the things they said is, Oh, we'll give you WHOIS privacy as part of the price. Well, so does hover.com. Uh, they said you have email redirection. Yes, so does hover.com. In fact, everything that Google offers, hover offers without any limits. Google for some reason said you have a limited number of DNS requests per year. I don't know what that number means. I don't know if it's a lot or a little, but why even have to worry about that? And do you really want to put all your eggs in the Google basket? Hover is great. Domain name management, just like everybody else, they're all registered with ICANN. They're official domain registrars. But you get great tools that make it easy to manage your domain. You have a simple process of registering a domain. I doesn't take any time at all. You don't have a lot of clicking. You get WHOIS privacy. They've got all the big extensions, just like everybody else. Dot com. Dot net. Country codes. They also have some really great new extensions like the dot club, which I love. They also have the best customer support around. Now I don't know what kind of customer support you get from Google, but it's not from a Python script; let's put it that way.

Gina: Ha ha ha.

Jeff: Ha ha ha.

Leo: When you call hover.com during business hours you will get no wait, no hold, no transferred phone service. A representative is there to help you. If you want, they will move your existing domains over to hover.com. Their concierge domain movement is great. In fact, you renew your domains for just ten dollars a year. Or ten dollars to move the domains; that gives you an additional year. Plus WHOIS privacy. Plus a lot of other great benefits. Hover is fabulous. I think you're going to love it. All my domain names are registered at Hover. They now offer volume discounts too. When you renew numerous domains, ten or more, you get a discount. I have so many domains … tons. That's going to save me a lot of money. The more domains you have, the less you have to pay. If you're one of those people, as I am, who registers domain names kind of just whenever I think of it, why not?

Jeff: Do you have any idea how many you have?

Leo: Uh, I can go to hover.com … It looks like 20 or 30. That's a lot. That's the other thing. I can quickly see at hover.com. I can manage them; I can move around. It really is the best way to do it. (Unintelligible) transfer service – awesome. For free, Hover will take care of the entire process, let you know when your domains are settled in your Hover account. They'll even transfer the DNS settings. Nobody does this. In every other case you have to figure out what your DNS settings are to change them … go over and change … Nope, they'll do it no matter how many domain names you have at no additional cost. That is great.

Gina: That's great.

Leo: Hover.com! I love them; you will too. By the way, use the offer code TWIG6. You get 10 percent off your first purchase. Hover. H-O-V-E-R dot com. Maybe you don't have a tip or … looks like you do. You got something you want to mention?

Gina: I do. I have a … I'm recycling content a little bit. We talked about this on All About Android a couple episodes ago, but today at the keynote they talked about how on Android L you're going to get your notifications on you lockscreen. They're going to look really pretty so you're not going to have to unlock your phone and swipe down your shade. Well I'm doing something similar right now with an app called DynamicNotifications for Android. It'll put notifications of your choice, so I can say just show me, you know (unintelligible) and Hangouts, and nothing else. Um, it'll put it right on your lockscreen. So if you have your phone out and you're doing something else you can just glance down at it and see your notifications. And you can … so there's a lockscreen, widgets, and you can also affix a widget to your home screen. That's there with your notifications so you don't have to mess with the shade. And there's a bunch of options here – custom screen timeouts, and you can you know do transparency and select themes. Really great app. Love it. Free with an app purchase for some premium features. But it's really cool, so if you can't wait for the Android L notification update you can kind of get some of it. Not quite as pretty as L is going to be, but it might hold you over until the release. That's DynamicNotifications.

Leo: Are you going to download the L stuff? I guess they're going to give you images for the Nexus 5 and then Nexus 7 this week.

Gina: Yeah. Yeah.

Leo: Will you install? Do you have an old Nexus 5 laying around?

Gina: Yeah, I mean I certainly have a Nexus 7 laying around that I will install it on. I might not install it on my, like, daily driver phone, you know.

Leo: Right.

Gina: Just because it is a preview, but yeah. For sure. I want to see …

Leo: I may put it on my 5, I have a Nexus 5. Maybe I'll put it on there.

Gina: Yep.

Leo: It'd be fun to play with.

Gina: Yeah.

Leo: I usually stay away from beta. What to they … do you have to be a developer? Do you have to pay any money? Do you have to say, I won't ever speak of this … I shall not speak of this thing we are doing together?

Gina: That's a good question. They generally don't …

Leo: What are the rules? They're pretty open about it …

Gina: Yeah, they're very open … unlike Apple, where you have to be a developer and program and it's a 100 bucks a year, whatever. And with Android, it's usually just a straight up download.

Leo: Maybe I'll try it. Jeff, you have, I'm sure a number …

Jeff: I like … I do, I decided …

Leo: How many Cardboard boxes did Google give away?

Jeff: Well, 20 percent of them went to women.

Gina: Ha ha ha ha. We got 20 percent.

Leo: There's the number.

Jeff: Gina (unintelligible) bragging about that. Yeah, you know it's a step, it's an improvement; it's not far enough. But we saw the real future. I just put on the rundown … You saw it earlier, but for people who didn't see it, the video of the girl middle school coders was a tear-in-the-eye moment.

Leo: Aw.

Gina: Jeff looked at me and I was going, like, I'm all right. I'm all right. Just a little something in my eye.

Jeff: I was too. I was the same way. That's under the number on the rundown. It's two minutes; it's really quite amazing.

Leo: Pull it up. Ladies and gentlemen, let's watch a little video. Do you have audio?

(Plays video showing middle school girl coders walking through halls of school.)

Leo: Oh, they were all in the front row.

Gina: They were.

Leo: They were at the conference. Why is the sound so bad? I feel like you're not getting the … oh, I see, this is a video from the conference. Somebody taped the conference.

Jeff: So … so …

Leo: That's really great. Don't you love that? So they made an app for him … (Video shows blind student.)

Gina: They made an app for him to navigate school so he could get to class.

Leo: Oh my God.

Gina: So he could find his way around.

Leo: Okay, now I am …

Jeff: Is that … six girls coded this in middle school. It is the coolest thing on earth.

Leo: So I apologize for the quality. This is actually a screen cap from the event, but … yeah, you can see (unintelligible) getting back onstage.

Gina: My favorite part is when they say, Yeah, you know if you mess up some of the code then the whole thing just breaks.

Leo: I hate it when that happens.

Gina: I hate it when that happens, I know! It's the worst!

Leo: That's so awesome.

Gina: It just all breaks.

Leo: Now I feel really pathetic with my app pick. Thanks, Jeff.

Jeff: Yeah. You gonna make them cry out here or not?

Leo: This is not going to make you cry, unless it's tears of joy. So I use the GoPro, as I was mentioning, ziplining, and so the easiest way to use the GoPro is to install the GoPro app on your Android device. I use it on all my devices; it's free. It lets you control it. You connect right to the camera. You get a preview. It's just the, it's just so great. But I don't know when they added this … there's a new feature that I love … in the settings you can use the GoPro image of the day as your wallpaper on your Android phone.

Gina: Oh.

Leo: So you get new wallpaper every single day, and it's always some cool GoPro image. Today's image is a middle school soccer field, and it actually works out really nicely as a background. You can kind of see it, the transparency here. There's a goalie stopping the kick. But these are always gorgeous images, like yesterday it was an aquarium. A free and easy way … you don't even have to have a GoPro camera. You just download the app and turn on the image of the day and every day you'll get an image from the GoPro.

Jeff: That reminds me, the thing that bored me most today …

Leo: What was that?

Jeff: Was ambient pictures on your TV.

Leo: I like that.

Jeff: Visual Muzak for life. I just found that unbearable.

Leo: I'm just looking for another way to leave my TV on all day.

Jeff: Oh, more power consumptions … more … sheesh.

Gina: Wait, wait. This is … it's images from your own device …

Leo: It's your pictures.

Jeff: Who cares?

Gina: Yeah …

Jeff: It's got the weather.

Gina: No?

Jeff: No.

Leo: Ha ha ha.

Gina: Ha ha ha.

Jeff: I can see the real cat right there. Shedding all over the place …

Gina: Biggest picture frame, the best picture frame in your house, Jeff. Why .. you didn't like that line?

Jeff: No. No. No. I that was … that was just ridiculous. That was Google trying too hard.

Leo: Well, they got this Chromecast …

Gina: Grandparents are going to love this feature.

Jeff: How many remote picture frames have we bought for grandparents that never got filled in?

Gina: I refuse to buy another one of those.

Jeff: Yeah. Right.

Gina: I'll just sit down. I'll rig up the tablet, but I'm not buying another one of those stupid picture frames.

Leo: Well now you can just get them a 35 dollar Chromecast …

Gina: Chromecast. Yeah.

Leo: Simple enough. Apparently Google Play Services is now rolling out. I just checked. I'm not getting it, but 5.0 Play Services will be rolling out with new security tools and Android Wear support.

Jeff: I got the 4.44 update just now. I didn't put it in but it's there.

Leo: You did? Ah, on your Nexus 5, 4.44. And look for Google Play Services 5. It should make its way to all devices over the next few days. This is not Google Play Store.

Gina: Right.

Leo: This is that little puzzle piece. The services.

Gina: Uh huh.

Leo: But it's actually more important than the store, because it's a lot of stuff behind the scenes. It's going to support Android wearables, which means your watches, which you get tomorrow, will work. That's why they had to push it out. Google Cast adds closed caption support from Chromecast. There's a new save to wallet button. To save offers from your app to your wallet. Great. Improved in-app purchase ads. Ha ha. Forget it; don't get it; it's terrible. Unless you've got a watch. Why? Why? Uh, then there's a few more things. App indexing. API. Anyway, these are always big and you don't really have much of a choice, so … enjoy.

Gina: Ha ha. It will be foisted upon you.

Leo: It's gonna be forced on you whether you want it or not. Hey, it's so nice to have Jeff and Gina here.

Jeff: It is so great.

Gina: It's great to be here.

Leo: This is the second time in a month. So just come back every other week. Why don't you?

Gina: Yeah, we'll just fly out.

Jeff: That's fine.

Leo: Why don't you? Let me ask you, are you glad you came out for IO?

Gina: Definitely.

Leo: Wasn't a waste of time?

Gina: No, not at all. Not at all. I'm really excited to be here. And I'll admit, part of it is that I'm really excited about that watch.

Leo: And you do get something. You get a watch.

Jeff: Which you could have bought for less than the airfare. But fine.

Leo: I got a monocle. How about that?

Gina: Well I was certainly happy to be here today and to be at All About Android last night. I got to chat …

Jeff: That was nice.

Leo: It was good to see you live on All About Android. If you haven't seen the show yet.

Jeff: I also just enjoyed being there. Tomorrow … I go to some sessions and understand what I can understand, but also just running into Googlers and talking to them …

Gina: That's where the (unintelligible) happens. You always get the stories, the good stories, yeah, from the Googlers.

Jeff: But the great thing, Leo, and this hit us all crazy, is that just because of you, because of the magic of Leo, people are like, Can we take your picture? Oh! Jeff and Gina!

Gina: Yeah, we got stopped on the way out today. Just on the way out of Musconi today. They wanted to take our picture, you know. It was really nice.

Leo: Good.

Gina: Yeah, so I'm thrilled to be here. It wasn't a waste of time.

Leo: That's 93 million selfies.

Gina: Ha ha ha.

Leo: What happens tomorrow and the next day at IO is really for developers. It's just tomorrow. It's seminars; it's work sessions.

Gina: Workshops. Code-ins.

Leo: Usually noise … and news … not significant news … what emerges.

Gina: There are, there will be some low level announcements …

Leo: Clarifications.

Gina: Clarifications that didn't come out of the keynote. People will write up some things that they learned. Sometimes you know there are kits, developer kits given out for the lesser projects, like maybe Tango, maybe Ara. I wouldn't be surprised if we heard more about Tango and Ara.

Jeff: (Reading next day's upcoming schedule) Containerizing the cloud with Docker. Designing for wearables. Grow your app with Google Identity.

Gina: That's a Google+ platform.

Jeff: 3D tablet and Oscar and (unintelligible).

Gina: A 3D tablet, okay. So that's Tango.

Jeff: Cross platform interaction design, Instant Buy everywhere.

Gina: Google Wallet.

Jeff: The dawn of fast data. The art of run time.

Gina: That's Art.

Jeff: Upgrading the engine …

Leo: In every case this is Art or whatever for people who are developing …

Gina: They're deep diving into these things, yes.

Jeff: Nest for developers.

Gina: So they are going to talk about Nest. But it's going to be stuff that wasn't keynote.

Jeff: Right. Robotics in a new world. With a protester, no doubt. There are also people arrested there on Google … in Star Trek plastic outfits.

Gina: Storm Troopers?

Leo: We call those Storm Troopers, Jeff.

Jeff: Yes.

Gina: Star Wars plastic …

Leo: These are not …

Gina: These are not the Star Wars plastics you were looking for. Ha ha ha.

Jeff: Don't get old, people. Don't get old.

Leo: I keep seeing people with Star Wars plastic outfits! You knock it off!

Jeff: You know what the problem is? It's brain latency.

Gina: That's true.

Jeff: It just takes time.

Leo: It's latency, that's all.

Jeff: An on and on and on it goes …

Leo: Well, you guys got to go to some of those just to find what the hell Google Cast is and isn't.

Jeff: Devox Power Tools. I'll be there.

Leo: How about debugging Dart apps with WebStorm? That's going on right now, I'm sorry we missed that.

Gina: That's going to be some heavy …

Leo: Three days of building useless stuff. The making of the world's craziest maker's conference. What did you think, speaking of which, of the bowling ball, the (unintelligible) …

Gina: The (unintelligible) machine …

Jeff: It made the geeks happy.

Gina: Yeah, I mean, you know, it was just something for people to look at while the countdown was happening …

Leo: Right.

Jeff: My gag was, there's this huge mechanical thing over in the corner and I said, Oh, the algorithm.

Leo: Ha. That’s how it works. There is an Ignite event. I think Kevin Marks is going to that.

Gina: Right. Kevin must be speaking at that, that's why.

Leo: At 4 o'clock this afternoon. If you run you can get back to it. Thank you Jeff. Thank you Gina. Thanks to all of you for watching. We do This Week in Google each and every week, even without Google IO. One p.m. Pacific, 4 p.m. Eastern time, 2000 UTC on TWiT. You can watch live. I'd like it if you do, because we can see the chat room in the back and forth of the chat room. But if you can't, we have On Demand audio and video available from twit.tv/twig. Or we're on all the platforms where you can get this kind of stuff. Our apps of course are available on Android. On IOS, even Windows phone and Blackberry. Just search for TWiT. They're not our apps; they're third party developers', but they do a great job and I really am grateful to them for that. You can also use Stitcher. Things like that. Or iTunes or whatever you use. DoggCatcher, Instacast, all of that. Pocket Cast. Thanks for watching, we appreciate it! We'll see you next week on TWiG. Bye bye.