Google is making an Android-powered entertainment system and will design and sell it under its own brand, according to the Wall Street Journal. This is somewhat like the hit Wifi-enabled music system made by Sonos, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-company. When I read the news, the word that came to mind: Amazing!

Amazing — because I just finished a post about Google’s me-too-ism affliction. Amazing because as MG Seigler points out, the Mountain View, Calif.-based Internet giant will make hardware.

Amazing, because Google thinks that it will actually be able to crack the consumer electronics marketplace. Amazing, to think that this company will build a supply chain and manage relationships with retailers and get people to buy it. (Or it can sell directly over the web, much like it did with its Nexus phones — pun intended.) Amazing, considering that the company’s track record on products beyond its core offerings — search, advertising and communication-oriented software — is spotty, at best.

Amazing, to see one of smartest companies show such lack of discipline and self awareness. Amazing!

PS: By the way, this is the mystery Google device that Stacey Higginbotham reported last week.

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It’s no secret that Sprint plans to shut down its iDEN network in 2013, leaving millions of Nextel and Boost Mobile customers to find new phones and service providers, but until recently the details of how it would sunset its aging push-to-talk systems were a secret. Over the weekend, blog Sprint 4G Rollout spotted a new Nextel landing page on the Sprint website that doesn’t just identify the cities where its shutting off iDEN, but the individual cell sites. If you’re a Nextel or a Boost customer with hopes of sticking with the service for the next year, the site is worth checking out.

Sprint's iDEN network in New Orleans. The dark towers are slated for decommissioning

According to 4G Rollout, New Orleans is the first market on the list with its initial cell sites scheduled to go offline in February shortly after Mardi Gras. Sprint is going to gradually phasing out iDEN so New Orleans Boost and Nextel customers won’t emerge from Fat Tuesday hangovers with no service. But Sprint will pack up its base stations at multiple towers, while expanding nearby cells to fill the gaps.

The iDEN network is actually over-built, designed before the Sprint’s purchase of Nextel and the ensuing flight of millions of customers from its data-impaired networks. So there’s plenty of capacity left in Nextel’s urban networks to cope with a topological rescaling. However, any time you do this kind of network tinkering there will always be coverage holes. Some Nextel and Boost customers can expect their service to suffer, especially as Sprint gets into 2013 and starts shutting down sites en masse.

Outside of New Orleans, there’s not too much useful information since Sprint doesn’t appear to have identified any other specific cell sites scheduled for decommissioning. But you can click on individual sites in your city or town to see when Sprint plans to start its evaluation. For instance, in my city Chicago, all of the sites will likely be under review in June.

Sprint plans to use iDEN’s 800 MHz spectrum for supplemental capacity on its LTE network, which will launch mid-year. But the way Sprint is winnowing down iDEN that spectrum won’t be available until the full network goes dark. Sprint may be shutting down sites, but it’s still using the spectrum. It’s just covering more ground with fewer towers.

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The business of making games is very much alive and well. But increasingly, the energy is moving away from AAA titles and console games to mobile apps built by a growing army of developers.

But don’t take my word for it, check out one of the premier game development events, the Games Developers Conference, held every year in San Francisco. Through its voluntary post-show surveys, the conference found that 43 percent of attendees in 2010 said they were involved in mobile development projects for a smartphone or tablets. Last year, 56 percent of attendees reported that smartphone or tablets development was their company’s major focus and 55 percent said this development was their company’s secondary focus.

The next GDC takes place from March 5-9 and the trend shows no signs of changing. Attendance was up to 19,000 in 2011 and early indications suggest the show should be even bigger this year. I talked with Meggan Scavio, general manager of the Game Developers Conference, about what she’s seeing and she said development is chasing user interest, which is booming in smartphones and tablets. The conference is evolving to fit what’s happening in the development world.

“Games are changing and team sizes are changing. People are finding it’s easier to build and distribute games on their own on mobile platforms,” Scavio said. “You’re seeing more traditional game developers working for smartphone development companies and these games are becoming more creative.”

The show itself has evolved in a lot of ways reflecting the rise of mobile gaming. The mobile summit, which used to be quiet side event, has morphed into the Smartphone & Tablets Games Summit with more than 20 sessions spread over two days. But also interesting to note is the rush of big technology companies looking to set up their own sponsored mobile developer days.

Google has expanded its developer day to two days and may continue its tradition of handing out free Android devices. This year it will be joined by Qualcomm, Unity and DeNA’s Mobage for the first time. Research in Motion, which has mainly conducted small business meetings at previous GDCs, is now going big with a large booth and it’s also sponsoring a session on developing for the PlayBook.

“We’re finally having discussions with mobile providers. They’re participating at a level they never have before,” Scavio said.

In a first for a mobile title at the show, GDC will also be doing an in-depth design look at Jetpack Joyride, a critical and consumer favorite. Much of the main conference has traditionally been dedicated to big budget console and PC titles but that’s starting to change, Scavio said.

She said traditional game development appears to be still very healthy. But the rise of mobile gaming is unmistakable.

It’s a good reminder of how smartphones and tablets are changing industries. We’re seeing stalwart Nintendo stumble through some tough times and Sony is trying to come back with a new Vita handheld game device. As Flurry pointed out already, revenue is increasingly flowing toward mobile app titles with mobile titles generating one third of all portable gaming revenues in 2010, up from 19 percent in 2009.

There’s still a need for big titles and dedicated hardware. Those are still responsible for some amazing gaming experiences that just can’t happen on mobile devices for the most part. But with more powerful smartphone and tablet hardware hitting the market, we’re getting even more sophisticated games that are increasingly immersive, not just time killers. And with cloud gaming services like OnLive, we’re seeing how mobile devices can play at a much higher level using a fast broadband connection. With smartphone and tablet penetration still growing with a lot of room left, this trend toward mobile gaming will only accelerate in the coming years. Consumers are embracing mobile games and developers are adjusting.

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From power management to packaging, the tech industry is finding new ways to reduce the environmental impact of computing. Find out more, and see our slide show of greener PCs.
Microsoft PressPass, Information for Journalists – Feature Stories

Apple reported some very impressive financial results on Tuesday, setting new records in terms of its revenue, profit and items sold for its first financial quarter of 2012. And according to Apple’s current record-high market cap of more than $ 400 billion, the old Wall Street adage of “buy on the rumor, sell on the news” did not hold true in this case.

That’s also reflected by new research out of online portfolio manager SigFig. The site tracks more than $ 25 billion in its clients’ assets, and SigFig says its users are four times as likely to hold Apple in their portfolios than any other stock in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, so the company had a nice pool of data to tapped into to analyze activity around Apple’s earnings release.

One interesting thing they discovered is that just five percent of SigFig users who own Apple actually trade it on earning days. And of that small portion that does trade the stock, the majority of activity — 60 percent — is on the buy side. According to SigFig, that could mean that these investors see Apple as a long-term holding.

SigFig put all the data into a handy infographic, which is embedded below (click to enlarge):

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Among the websites and services that went dark on Wednesday to protest the anti-piracy bills that are currently making their way through Congress, one of the more controversial is Wikipedia. A number of critics — including some regular contributors to the “open source” encyclopedia — say the site shouldn’t be taking an advocacy position on such an issue, since it is supposed to represent a neutral point of view. But if anything, it could be argued that the internal process that led to that decision is actually a great illustration of how Wikipedia functions.

Among those criticizing the encyclopedia for its day-long blackout (which the Wall Street Journal said will affect more than 10 million users) was tech blogger Paul Carr, writing for the new site PandoDaily. In his post, Carr argued that Twitter CEO Dick Costolo was right when he said blacking out a global business to protest a U.S. law is “foolish,” and that Wikipedia was making a grave mistake by taking such a position, especially since the site just spent months trying to raise money from users to pay its bills:

[T]o shutter Wikipedia — a crowd-funded international encyclopedia — in protest of a single national issue is even worse. It’s idiotic, it’s selfish and it sets a horrible, horrible precedent.

Does Wikipedia have a duty to remain online?

Carr contends that because Wikipedia is funded by its members and users, it owes the world “the courtesy of staying live, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.” But his main point seems to be the same one that other critics have made — namely, that taking a position against a law like SOPA or PIPA (the former is the House version of the anti-piracy bill and the latter is the Senate version) is fundamentally at odds with Wikipedia’s stated goal of remaining neutral. This goal is spelled out in the site’s guidelines, which enforce what is known as the NPOV or “neutral point of view” in articles.

One editor for the site agreed, saying the blackout (which only affects the English portion of the site, and doesn’t affect the mobile version at all) put Wikipedia on “slippery slope,” which could force it to consider protests for all kinds of public issues. “Before we know it, we’re blacked out because we want to save the whales,” Robert Lawton told the Associated Press. Other users and contributors said they were concerned that by taking a position on a specific issue, Wikipedia might call into question its neutral position on other things.

Co-founder Jimmy Wales, however, has said that the two things are completely separate, and that just because the articles themselves are supposed to be neutral on a particular issue, that doesn’t mean the Wikipedia community as a whole shouldn’t be able to make its opinions known about issues that affect the openness of the internet:

@hakantee The encyclopedia will always be neutral. The community need not be, not when the encyclopedia is threatened!—
Jimmy Wales (@jimmy_wales) January 17, 2012

The Wikipedia founder also pointed out that it was not his decision to shut down the encyclopedia for a day — although much of the mainstream media coverage made it sound as though he had unilaterally made that choice. “This was a consensus decision of the community not mine alone,” he said in response to one critic on Twitter. In a note to the public, Sue Gardner — the executive director of Wikimedia, the non-profit foundation that administers the crowdsourced encyclopedia — also discussed the internal process that arrived at the decision, noting that it was proposed by several administrators of the site and then voted on by members, just the same way other choices are.

Wikipedia’s process was democratic, as it should be

After the site asked contributors and users for their thoughts about what action Wikipedia should take, more than 1,800 people responded and proposed a number of different approaches, including a global blackout and a blackout just for U.S. users (similar to Google, which blacked out its logo but only for U.S. IP addresses). According to the protest’s chief proponents –who were identified only by Wikipedia handles such as User:Nuclear Warfare and User:Risker – the vote for a global blackout won by a slim majority of 55 percent. Advocates of that decision said that since the legislation could affect global sites and services, protesting it should also be global.

Blogger and Cato Institute scholar Timothy Lee argued on Twitter that criticizing the Wikipedia decision (which SOPA’s congressional sponsor, Rep. Lamar Smith, also did — calling it “a publicity stunt”) shows a lack of understanding about how the user-generated encyclopedia works. While it is tempting to think of the site as a service like Twitter or Facebook, where a group of individuals control the company that offers the service and can take whatever action they wish, Wikipedia is run by a community. There are repeated criticisms about the “cabal” that governs the community, or about the influence that Jimmy Wales has over it, but the principle it operates on is not in doubt.

As Megan Garber notes at The Atlantic, the discussion and debate around the decision is a fascinating glimpse into how this sprawling and somewhat anarchic global community of info-nerds functions. It may not be pretty, and it may not always work, but the SOPA and PIPA protest doesn’t highlight any of that — if anything, it does the exact opposite.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Klobetime and

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A number of major web sites and even some PC games are scheduled to shut down briefly on January 18 to protest the proposed Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the US Congress. Read more…

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Smartphone and tablet purchases have been on the rise for several years, but 2011 was a turning point: This was the first year that these mobile devices outsold desktop and laptop PCs. The effect — and perhaps some of the cause of this — is a love affair with mobile apps, leading to more apps sold than ever and more time spent with them than ever. We mobile consumers demonstrated this very clearly both in the U.S. and abroad: Apple this month hit 18 billion downloads total on its iOS App Store, and Google’s Android Market likewise hit 10 billion.

As the year winds down, here’s a look back at the biggest, most significant things that happened in the apps we use on our smartphones and tablets this year, as well as the most important themes to watch out for come 2012.

In 2011…

We spent more time in apps than browsing. For the first time ever, we used mobile apps more than opening up a browser window to access Web-based services. Flurry Analytics found that users had crossed over in mid-2011; we spent 81 minutes a day in apps versus 74 minutes in a browser. A year earlier, the tally had been an average of 64 minutes in a browser versus just 43 minutes in apps.

Flurry

The iOS App Store proved it is still the place for devs who want to make money. Android phone unit sales are outpacing iPhones, yet two-thirds of the most downloaded apps are free on the Android platform, indicating that users of the Google-powered devices are less interested in buying apps. The developers are the ones who feel this acutely: On average Android appmakers earned 24 cents for every dollar iOS developers make.

The app obsession went international.  As app downloads grew this year, the percentage of them coming from the U.S. shrunk from 55 percent in January to 47 percent by October. In the meantime, China’s percentage of app downloads skyrocketed 870 percent in 2011, Argentina’s shot up 527 percent and Saudi Arabia’s increased  388 percent, just to name a few, according to Flurry. Apple experienced this same trend with both its iOS app sales as well as its tablet and smartphone sales, as China quickly became its second-most important market in 2011.

Google promised, but did not deliver a solution to the Android update problem. A headache for both carriers and developers, Google publicly acknowledged the problem that not all Android devices were getting timely or consistent updates as Google frequently improved its mobile OS, and in May promised a forthcoming set of guidelines to alleviate it. Though several carriers and handset makers promised to work with Google on this, nothing of substance has materialized, and some are already calling the Android Update Alliance “dead.”

In 2012…

More HyLoMo everywhere. “HyLoMo” is a cutesy, shorter way of saying “hyper-local mobile,” a concept that’s already being infused into apps, but should take off in a big way next year. The basic concept: Much of our activity is reasonably local — we tend to shop, eat and travel in the areas near to where we live and work. Smartphones already know where we are, so apps and any service can now take advantage of the river of information that’s now available from a variety of sources about where we tend to go, what we tend to buy and what we want to do. “The amount of real-time data that’s available can change apps into being infinitely more useful,” says IMMR analyst Phil Hendrix, who’s researched this HyLoMo trend at GigaOM Pro (Subscription required). Whether that’s searching, making purchase decisions or looking for travel information, both consumers, businesses and advertisers should benefit.

Voice-control integration will explode. Apple isn’t the first phonemaker to use voice control or a natural language interface, but the iPhone 4S’s Siri, introduced in October, set off a wave of mainstream interest in the technology. And this coming year we’ll likely see much more about voice-based interfaces from its competitors — Google is reportedly working on its own version. Meanwhile, Nuance (whose technology is used in Siri) just bought rival Vlingo, in hopes of attracting more high-profile customers as “virtually every mobile and consumer electronics company on the planet [looks] for ways to integrate natural, conversational voice interactions into their mobile products, applications, and services,” Nuance CEO Mike Thompson said.

NFC grows, but not for payments. It feels like we’ve been betting on NFC for a long time. And in 2012, we’re betting on it again. There’s going to be even more activity, but it will probably not be as much about payments as the other behaviors around paying for things: marketing offers and loyalty rewards/points from vendors. You can already see this in how Google its setting up its Wallet and Offers products. Look for NFC to be weaved also into social networking and contact exchange apps next year.

More niche app stores will emerge. The other side of the coin of Apple and Google’s mobile app stores’ popularity is that it’s hard to find good apps. That means it’s more challenging for developers to get noticed. Apple’s tried to deal with this issue through curated lists. GigaOM Pro’s Colin Gibbs says (Subscription required) for Android this will mean more branded app stores, similar to Amazon’s. The Android market “is so cluttered” that more app stores within it will emerge, he said, “either as pure retail outlets for niche markets” or companies pushing their own content. Potential examples include Best Buy and Electronic Arts. And there’s also a great opportunity for corporate-focused app stores as well.

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After a long-running controversy, the 13,000 employees of the  Los Angeles Police Department will definitely not move to Google Apps. And that’s final.

On Wednesday, the Los Angeles City Council voted to officially kill a proposed deployment of Google Apps to the LAPD.  The city’s other 17,000 employees–those outside law enforcement — will keep using Gmail, the Los Angeles Times reported last night.

The council voted unanimously to change the terms of the $ 7.2 million contract signed in August 2009, to enable LAPD to stick with its existing Novell Groupwise email system, according to the Times’ report.

A source close to the matter said LA renewed the contract for another year in September 2011, with an option to add two more years. And, according to a report to the council, Google’s obligation to fund Groupwise licenses is capped at $ 350,000 per year for the life of the contract.

Two years ago, the LA-Google deal, with CSC acting as contractor, was trumpeted by Google to show that Google Apps – Gmail, specifically — was ready for use by large organizations. But the LAPD had misgivings about how secure Gmail is. For law enforcement and court officials who must deal with sensitive information — evidence, names of confidential informants, etc. — security is critical. Because the LAPD must communicate with the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies, its communications must meet federal Criminal Justice Information Security standards, as well — something no cloud-based mail is yet able to do.

That means the issue  is not be as much about Gmail per se as cloud-based email, in general, a fact conceded privately by even some of Google’s largest competitors. A spokeswoman for LA city council president Eric Garcetti reiterated that today. “This is about the security of cloud. There are federal as well as local security requirements that must be met,” she said.

For it’s part, Google  has long maintained that the LAPD inserted new requirements after the contract was inked, stalling deployment.

According to an emailed statement from a Google spokesman:

We’re disappointed that the City introduced requirements for the LAPD after the contract was signed that are, in its own words, ‘currently incompatible with cloud computing’ …  Even so, Los Angeles taxpayers have already saved more than two million dollars and the City expects to save millions more in the years ahead.

Even though this might not be a Gmail issue, the publicity is definitely not good for Google. Google only does cloud-based mail, so if this mess causes other agencies or cities to rethink a move to Google Apps, that hurts the vendor’s efforts. And it could boost competitors like Microsoft and IBM that offer email in both on-premises and cloud-deployment models.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user LifeSupercharger.

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After a long-running controversy, the 13,000 employees of the  Los Angeles Police Department will definitely not move to Google Apps. And that’s final.

On Wednesday, the Los Angeles City Council voted to officially kill a proposed deployment of Google Apps to the LAPD.  The city’s other 17,000 employees–those outside law enforcement — will keep using Gmail, the Los Angeles Times reported last night.

The council voted unanimously to change the terms of the $ 7.2 million contract signed in August 2009, to enable LAPD to stick with its existing Novell Groupwise email system, according to the Times’ report.

A source close to the matter said LA renewed the contract for another year in September 2011, with an option to add two more years. And, according to a report to the council, Google’s obligation to fund Groupwise licenses is capped at $ 350,000 per year for the life of the contract.

Two years ago, the LA-Google deal, with CSC acting as contractor, was trumpeted by Google to show that Google Apps – Gmail, specifically — was ready for use by large organizations. But the LAPD had misgivings about how secure Gmail is. For law enforcement and court officials who must deal with sensitive information — evidence, names of confidential informants, etc. — security is critical. Because the LAPD must communicate with the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies, its communications must meet federal Criminal Justice Information Security standards, as well — something no cloud-based mail is yet able to do.

That means the issue  is not be as much about Gmail per se as cloud-based email, in general, a fact conceded privately by even some of Google’s largest competitors. A spokeswoman for LA city council president Eric Garcetti reiterated that today. “This is about the security of cloud. There are federal as well as local security requirements that must be met,” she said.

For it’s part, Google  has long maintained that the LAPD inserted new requirements after the contract was inked, stalling deployment.

According to an emailed statement from a Google spokesman:

We’re disappointed that the City introduced requirements for the LAPD after the contract was signed that are, in its own words, ‘currently incompatible with cloud computing’ …  Even so, Los Angeles taxpayers have already saved more than two million dollars and the City expects to save millions more in the years ahead.

Even though this might not be a Gmail issue, the publicity is definitely not good for Google. Google only does cloud-based mail, so if this mess causes other agencies or cities to rethink a move to Google Apps, that hurts the vendor’s efforts. And it could boost competitors like Microsoft and IBM that offer email in both on-premises and cloud-deployment models.

Photo courtesy of Flickr user LifeSupercharger.

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