Hasta La Gadget!

During Google’s I/O developer’s conference keynote, it actually slipped in quite a bit of, yes, developer news amongst all the noisy consumer launches. One biggie was the announcement that any and all companies looking for computing horsepower can jump on board its formerly-limited Google Compute Engine, part of the Google Cloud Platform. In order to compete with the kingpin of that space, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its Elastic Compute Cloud, Google has bolstered its platform with new features, including shared-core instances for low-intensity chores, advanced routing, large persistent disks up to 10TB in volume size and sub-hour billing to keep costs down. It also updated its App Engine hosting service with PHP runtime, calling it “the most requested feature,” and launched Google Cloud Datastore to go up against AWS’ cloud storage services. All that will surely help Mountain View gain a bigger slice of the multi-billion dollar cloud infrastructure market, and should open up more space for all those apps.

Filed under: Internet, Software, Google

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Via: Techcrunch

Source: Google Cloud Platform Blog

As a part of the 7 Techmakers and a Microphone panel tonight at Google I/O, Project Glass Staff Hardware Engineer Jean Wang dropped in this slide reflecting on the process of developing the headset. We’ve seen pictures of a few early Glass prototypes before, but as she describes, this shows off the full process from strapping a cellphone to a pair of goggles along with a pico projector shining directly into the wearer’s eyes. The jump from off the shelf components to custom 3D-printed materials is represented in the third version (top right), and allowed the progress seen along the bottom row.

She also got a laugh pointing out that the Glass-inspired SNL skit starring our friend Fred Armisen wasn’t “too far off” the team’s initial efforts in gesture and voice control. The panel itself focused on a series of TED-style segments featuring seven women discussing being technical leaders inside their company. You can check out the entire thing embedded after the break or just zoom to the Google Glass part (6:13) for more details.

Filed under: Wearables, Google

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Via: Danny Sullivan (Twitter)

Source: Google Developers (YouTube), Google Developers

Take the 3D sensor inside the Microsoft Kinect, shrink it down to a tenth of its original size and add a bunch of mobile capabilities, and you have yourself PrimeSense’s latest conquest, better known as Capri. The company, which is the brains behind the Kinect, has been openly working on bringing a tiny-yet-advanced 3D experience to tablets, televisions and smartphones for quite some time now. And it’s proud enough of its progress so far that it’s willing to give some real-life demonstrations to developers attending Google I/O. You may not see Capri embedded on the PCB of your portable gadget anytime soon — at least, not until PrimeSense winds up wooing the pants off a lucky OEM or two — so in the meantime, the company has connected the sensor board to the Nexus 10 via micro-USB.

Unlike the Kinect, however, PrimeSense doesn’t think gestures will play a significant role in how we use Capri to interact with our gadgets. Rather, it seems to be more focused on 3D-based use case scenarios, many of which haven’t even been thought up yet. As you’ll see in the video below, we were shown an AR game that takes the environment around you — walls, furniture and other elements — and uses them as restrictions, just as much as they would be in real life. In another app, Capri snapped a three-dimension shot of an object on the table in front of us, captured its measurements and let us export that image to another device or even a 3D printer. In many respects, PrimeSense appears to be taking the same strategy Google does with Glass: get developers excited about the tech in the hopes they’ll come up with clever uses for it. And while the company isn’t ready to put Capri in their hands yet, the SDK is up for grabs, and I/O is no doubt an ideal place to build excitement for it. If you’re looking for more info, we have a gallery, video and press release below, and you’ll find the SDK at the More Coverage link.

Filed under: Cellphones, Peripherals, Tablets, Mobile

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Nearly two years ago to the day, Google introduced Music Beta at I/O 2011. But in reality, it was little more than a gigantic cloud to store 20,000 of your favorite tracks. Despite a plethora of rumors that the search giant would beat Spotify to the punch by launching a subscription-based music service in the United States, we got a digital locker that has done little to distract most listeners from giving Rdio, Pandora, iTunes and other like services at least a piece of their heart. Fast forward to today, and Google’s finally joining the bandwagon… in majorly limited fashion.

Google Music All Access is presently only available for mobile as an Android app, and only to users in the US. Moreover, it costs $9.99 — the exact same sum as practically every one of its rivals. Rivals that have multi-year headstarts in terms of mind and market share. (Yes, it’s $7.99 per month if you sign up prior to June 30th.) Google has landed deals with the same “major labels” as everyone else, but even product manager Paul Joyce affirmed to us here at I/O that All Access doesn’t have access to any exclusives. In a post-keynote meeting with Joyce, he noted that this is only the start for the product. Naturally, Google’s going to do its finest work on its own platform, but it’s certainly odd to see iOS users left out in the cold given Google’s acknowledgement of its importance just minutes earlier.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, Google

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Source: Google Play

According to Bernhard Seefeld, product management director at Google Maps, “this is the most significant overhaul of Maps since it launched in 2005.” We sat down with both Seefeld as well as Jonah Jones — lead designer of Google Maps — following a marathon keynote to kick off Google I/O. Their slice of the event centered around the desktop refresh of Google Maps, but there’s actually a lot more to be excited about than what was announced today. Essentially, the preview that I/O attendees were granted access to is the first instance of Maps for desktop using vectors instead of tiles. In lay terms, that’s a far sexier rendering engine, and users of the mobile Maps products will already be familiar with how it feels. Seefeld affirmed that the new desktop Maps is slightly quicker to load, but you’ll want a WebGL-supporting browser to take advantage of the bells and whistles. (In our tests, the Maps experience was far superior in Chrome compared to Firefox.)

We toyed around with the new layout for a bit, and overall, it looks and feels better. Refreshing, you could say. The search box is now entirely more useful, popping up intelligent cards beneath places you search for. You’ll have glanceable access to operating hours, surrounding traffic and recommended places — that’s not new, it’s just surfaced in a more sensible way now. There’s also dedicated shortcuts to directions and starring. Visually, it looks a lot nicer, the zooms are a little cleaner, and the search box is a tad more useful. Street View is accessed via the search box now, and there’s a toggle on the right side that overlays Google Earth data and (impressively) shows it from varying degrees of tilt. The magic really begins after you sign in with your Google account. If you’ve starred or rated a restaurant using Google Maps or Google+, for example, it’ll automatically populate recommended eateries that your friends have rated highly. If, of course, your friends are using Google+.

Filed under: GPS, Software, Google

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Source: Google Maps preview