TechieGroups

INTERNET SEARCH OUTFIT Google has boasted that it now activates 700,000 Android devices per day.

The numbers were revealed by Andy Rubin in a Google Plus post as a brief note. “There are now over 700,000 Android devices activated every day,” wrote the Android operating system chief.

Later he clarified the statement and explained that each activation is a new one, as opposed to an old handset making its way into new hands.

“…and for those wondering, we count each device only once (ie, we don’t count re-sold devices),” he said, adding, “and ‘activations’ means you go into a store, buy a device, put it on the network by subscribing to a wireless service”.

This means that there might be uncounted handsets out there, but it’s perhaps unlikely that there are many that have not connected to wireless services. Some might be lurking in Christmas stockings though, so perhaps the new year will see an updated post from Rubin.

In July the company said that it was seeing 550,000 activations each day, and earlier, 400,000. µ

Reiterating what the company has been saying about Android 4.0, Google's Dan Morrill said today that the Ice Cream Sandwich source code would be made available to the general public "soon," after the software begins appearing on new and existing Android devices.

The source code for Android 3.0 was never made available – Google's official reasoning for this is that it didn't want the tablet-oriented Honeycomb code running on smaller screens, though others have suggested (as we noted in our review of the Xoom) that Honeycomb seemed to be a bit rushed at the time of release. Most of the focus on Ice Cream Sandwich so far has concerned what it will do for phones, but for tablets it's likely to represent an iteration of Honeycomb with more polish and fewer rough edges.

The lack of Honeycomb source code has been criticized by the open source community, which often takes advantage of Android's "openness" relative to iOS or Windows Phone 7 to develop custom Android distributions for all kinds of devices, including some (like the HP TouchPad) for which it was never really intended. Once its source code is released, Ice Cream Sandwich should give these developers a more modern and robust platform to start from.

Source: Ars Technica

INTERNET SEARCH GIANT Google has revealed its energy footprint for the first time, and we doubt that it could buy its sandals off the shelf.

It would not take a genius to speculate that the firm uses a lot of energy, but it’s very huge indeed. Headline grabbing trivia include the fact that it could power Salt Lake City, Utah.

According to the New York Times, Google’s datacentres draw a continuous 260 million Watts or, if you prefer, around a quarter of the output of the average nuclear power plant.

This is fine though, as while Google uses a large amount of electricity, it stops its users from using other fuel, like petrol.

According to the company you should remember how much money is saved when, for example, someone does not drive to a library to look for information, but instead searches for it online. The same could be said for online shopping, perhaps.

“The numbers] look big in the small context,” said Urs Hoelzle, Google’s SVP for technical infrastructure in an interview with the New York Times.

The amount of power that individuals use is also small when looked at in perspective, according to the report, and consumption is reckoned to be around 180 Watt-hours a month, equal to running a light bulb for three hours.

Other numbers are described in fun terms, and Google reckons that running Gmail for a year, per user, is the equivalent to drinking a bottle of wine, sticking a note in it and tossing it into the sea, while performing 100 searches is the same as running a 60W lightbulb for 28 minutes.

Google also makes an effort to improve the way its buildings use energy and has cut down on car numbers by offering its workers shuttle services to use between their homes and offices. It added that it also offsets its carbon through “very high quality” outlets, such as livestock farms.

In a blog post Hoelzle said that Google is very close to completely offsetting is carbon emissions thanks to these and other novel methods.

“We started the process of getting to zero by making sure our operations use as little energy as possible. For the last decade, energy use has been an obsession. We’ve designed and built some of the most efficient servers and data centers in the world-using half the electricity of a typical data center. Our newest facility in Hamina, Finland, opening this weekend, uses a unique seawater cooling system that requires very little electricity,” he explained.

“Whenever possible, we use renewable energy. We have a large solar panel installation at our Mountain View campus, and we’ve purchased the output of two wind farms to power our data centers. For the greenhouse gas emissions we can’t eliminate, we purchase high-quality carbon offsets.” µ

INTERNET SEARCH GIANT Google has revealed its energy footprint for the first time, and we doubt that it could buy its sandals off the shelf.

It would not take a genius to speculate that the firm uses a lot of energy, but it’s very huge indeed. Headline grabbing trivia include the fact that it could power Salt Lake City, Utah.

According to the New York Times, Google’s datacentres draw a continuous 260 million Watts or, if you prefer, around a quarter of the output of the average nuclear power plant.

This is fine though, as while Google uses a large amount of electricity, it stops its users from using other fuel, like petrol.

According to the company you should remember how much money is saved when, for example, someone does not drive to a library to look for information, but instead searches for it online. The same could be said for online shopping, perhaps.

“The numbers] look big in the small context,” said Urs Hoelzle, Google’s SVP for technical infrastructure in an interview with the New York Times.

The amount of power that individuals use is also small when looked at in perspective, according to the report, and consumption is reckoned to be around 180 Watt-hours a month, equal to running a light bulb for three hours.

Other numbers are described in fun terms, and Google reckons that running Gmail for a year, per user, is the equivalent to drinking a bottle of wine, sticking a note in it and tossing it into the sea, while performing 100 searches is the same as running a 60W lightbulb for 28 minutes.

Google also makes an effort to improve the way its buildings use energy and has cut down on car numbers by offering its workers shuttle services to use between their homes and offices. It added that it also offsets its carbon through “very high quality” outlets, such as livestock farms.

In a blog post Hoelzle said that Google is very close to completely offsetting is carbon emissions thanks to these and other novel methods.

“We started the process of getting to zero by making sure our operations use as little energy as possible. For the last decade, energy use has been an obsession. We’ve designed and built some of the most efficient servers and data centers in the world-using half the electricity of a typical data center. Our newest facility in Hamina, Finland, opening this weekend, uses a unique seawater cooling system that requires very little electricity,” he explained.

“Whenever possible, we use renewable energy. We have a large solar panel installation at our Mountain View campus, and we’ve purchased the output of two wind farms to power our data centers. For the greenhouse gas emissions we can’t eliminate, we purchase high-quality carbon offsets.” µ

Google announced last October that they would be beta testing their Google Fiber initiative in a small residential neighborhood affiliated with Stanford University, and one lucky Redditor posted the results. The service is being provided free to the faculty and staff of Stanford that live just off campus and the speeds are mostly unheard of in this country. This beta test, of course, comes ahead of the roll-out of their Kansas City experiment in 1 Gbps fiber internet service. Speedtest results linked and pictured below for you to drool over. 

Source: Reddit

Google Music Beta, the search giant’s music streaming service, launched earlier this summer to tepid reviews before drifting into the background after the much-ballyhooed release of Spotify in the United States. While garnering praise for its audio quality and Android connectivity, it was knocked for lacking an iOS app and, perhaps more importantly, the ability to purchase music.

While there’s still no music store, Google’s hoping to renew your interest in Google Music with Magnifier, a new music discovery site curated by the Google Music team. Not only does Magnifier offer daily song recommendations, it can download those tracks for free into your Google Music account.

Like most of Google Music, Magnifier’s smooth. It took just a few seconds for the song to appear in my library and then just a handful more for the song to start playing. While Magnifier hasn’t been around long enough for me to know if my tastes match up with those of its editors, I can see myself checking back regularly based solely on the ease of use.

If Google could only secure the rights to actually sell music, a stream of interesting free music coupled with Google’s generous cloud storage (roughly 20,000 songs for free compared to for 10GB on Apple’s iCloud service) could put Google Music on equal footing with iTunes and Amazon’s Digital Marketplace.

ADVERTISING BROKER Google has announced a large jump in year on year revenues and made the staggering announcement that 550,000 Android devices are being activated daily.

Google’s financial results for the second quarter of 2011, the first with Larry Page as CEO, had very little wrong about them. A 32 per cent increase in year on year revenue to just over bn with profits of .51bn simply cannot be sniffed at. As impressive as that was, Page’s claim that Google has loaded Android onto 130 million handsets and that figure is growing at the rate of 550,000 a day really highlighted Google’s dominance in the growing smartphone market.

Google’s earnings release singled out revenues from the UK, which accounts for 11 per cent of the firm’s revenues. While the percentage of revenue that the UK provides Google hasn’t changed in the past 12 months, the fact it has held steady as overall revenue has grown 32 per cent is rather impressive.

Ultimately for Google the number of adverts it can sell makes all of this possible, and the firm reported an 18 per cent rise in paid clicks from the same period last year. Perhaps the only blot on Google’s copybook was a two per cent drop in paid advertising from the previous quarter.

Google said, “We expect to continue to make significant capital expenditures” and reported a war chest of .1bn to go out and buy whatever takes its fancy.

A few months ago Google announced that it was activating 400,000 Android smartphones a day, and while Page’s figure of 550,000 daily activations is likely go both up and down as the months progress, there’s no doubt that the army of Android devices has well and truly arrived.

While Google’s share price fell all day yesterday, since the earnings report and at the time of publication it was up over 12 per cent, hovering just below the 0 mark in pre-market trading. It seems investors believe Google has a lot more potential in the coming months. µ

ANDROID USE IS GROWING at a phenomenal rate, with more than half a million new devices bearing the Google operating system being activated every day.

The revelation came from a tweet by Andy Rubin, SVP of mobile at Google and the guy in charge of the Android project.

It was just over six months ago that Rubin reported daily activations at 300,000, which was a significant number at the time. It was 100,000 more than the 200,000 daily activations it recorded in August of 2010, but now the increase is 200,000, showing that the rate of growth is steadily increasing.

And that growth is set to continue, with Rubin claiming that the figure is increasing by 4.4 per cent week on week, which means that we could yet see Android reach a cool million daily activations by the end of the year, if not substantially more.

Google’s release of Android 3.X Honeycomb is likely to have had some impact on the figures, as this was specifically designed for tablets, which previously had to make do with a smartphone version made somewhat bigger.

Smartphones are still likely the highest contributor, however, with many new Android models hitting the market such as the HTC Evo 3D, which is set to arrive in the UK next month.

Android has been stealing market share from competitors for some time. In April it dominated a third of the market, according to Comscore figures, and Gartner believes it will rule close to half of the smartphone market by the end of 2012. While it might seem like an exaggeration to some, the latest figures from Rubin show just what kind of potential is still left in the little green robot. µ

For many, the deal breaker for the Logitech Revue and other Google TV products was two words: IR blaster. Opting to act as a supplement to your current home theater set-up rather than a replacement for a cable/satellite set-top box, the device was hamstrung by a somewhat complicated set-up process. But this was never about the hardware, the workhorse of this product was the Android-based OS behind it all. Bringing the web to the TV has been a concept bouncing around the consumer electronics industry years, and Google’s effort leveraged the Chrome browser to bring any content to your living room. The execution, though solid, failed to meet expectations; primarily because there seemed to be so much left on the table. Like Apple TV, Google TV products had no access to the apps that made their respective OS’s so popular and full featured. 

Google used I/O 2011 to announce that apps would be coming to Google TV during a reset that brings Honeycomb 3.1 to the table. First reported by GTV Source shortly after the conference, Google went so far as to invite some devs to participate in a beta of the new software under a project called ‘Fishtank.’ In recent days there’s been signs of progress in this program based on the appearance of device listings for Google TV devices under the Android Market’s settings menu. Though apps could not yet be sent to user devices, this was a good indicator.

Now, it appears that the appearance may be tied to the Fishtank programs deployment. As reported by Geek.com’s Russel Holly, images and details of the hardware received by Fishtank developers. The hardware closely mirrors that of Logitech’s Revue, featuring the same Intel CE4100 SoC and even the same wireless keyboard. Port selection mirrors the Revue but is notable for the presence of a blanked out second HDMI in port; a coaxial connection is noted but, based on its size and appearance, is likely to be used with a WiFi antenna. 

Loaded in the device is what’s known as Google TV 2.0 beta, the Android 3.1 based OS we’ve been waiting for, complete with apps. Unfortunately the only apps up right now are a Clock app and Live TV app, whose source is the HDMI input on the device. The interface retains Honeycomb’s blue and black theme and shows plenty of effective optimizations for the big screen. Fishtank is supported by a private Groups message board through which the main request from the 50 or so participants is the ability to overlay video with data from an application. This feature is apparently available while on the home screen, but not open for developers to use. 

Fishtank isn’t the only testing ground for Google TV 2.0, though. We can confirm that Logitech is testing the new software on Revue units on their campus and working with in-house developers to prepare a suite of apps for its users. Current Revue owners can expect the new software to land late this summer, a broad window to be sure, but better than no window at all. Logitech would not comment on new hardware, though with such an upgrade in software it would be surprising to not see something new in hardware. It’s certainly comforting to see that GTV early adopters will not be left behind, as can so often be the case. More information on Google TV 2.0 as it becomes available.

INQUIRER READERS prefer to store their documents and data locally instead of surrendering it to a Google Chromebook and its cloud storage.

In a poll we asked readers for their views on Google’s Chome OS-based laptops, and found that only a small minority of them are tempted by the devices.

Just seven per cent said that they would buy a Google Chromebook because they thought it would be useful for their purposes, just browsing the net.

Only four per cent liked it because it is ‘an inexpensive laptop’, thinking it makes a good, cheap alternative to, you know, a proper laptop, while 16 per cent said they would rather buy a tablet.

The highest number of respondents, 47 per cent, said, ‘No, I prefer to keep my documents on my own PC’, suggesting that perhaps the cloud, or at least Google’s cloud, has little appeal.

However there is a bit of good news for the Google marketing machine, as just 26 per cent of poll respondents asked, ‘What’s a Chromebook?’. µ