Google came on really strong this week at IO. It has taken me several days to process all of the announcements and I am just starting to grok what happened. There was so much that I am going to approach it in several posts. My first post is Google TV.

First let me say that I knew about Google TV the night before the public announcement. I was playing the IO SCVNGR hunt and couldn’t find the barcode on the water fountain. I wandered upstairs and was told by a big security guard that the only water fountain on this floor was “that one over there.” I walked where he was pointing and found myself in the main hall where the keynote is. There on the screen in huge letters was “GOOGLE TV – TV meets web, web meets TV.” Yes, I blew the opportunity to snap a photo and send it to Techcrunch.

I don’t own a TV and hardly ever watch one. All of my media is consumed through my laptop, ipad, android devices, ipod touch, or good ole fashion book. I just don’t like TV. To me it is an offensive medium. The shows are sensational and lowest common denominator. The ads are obtrusive and irrelevant. The fact that you have to watch things on schedule is outdated. TV to me represents one of the last holdovers from the old age. The age of one to many.

The web on the other hand is like an infinite faceted jewel. It is something different to each person. Watch what you want when you want. Go from the mainstream hits all the way down the long tail to the super niche. Text, video, music, games, and data all mashed up into compelling web apps that are accessible 24 hours a day from your computer or mobile device.

TV has been waiting to be rethought. As Google pointed out during the keynote–television is a $70 billion a year advertising market. It’s the broadest market on earth. But like I said, the problem is that it’s lowest common denominator. You have to throw the largest net possible to scoop up as many people as possible. Enter Google TV.

Google TV’s interface is deceptively simple. It’s just a search box that drops down in a light-boxesque manner at the top of the screen. You type in a search term and it searches whats on tv right now – whats on tv in the future and whats on the web. Of course it uses a little AJAX to suggest terms from what you’ve typed in. During the keynote they typed in “Mother’s Day” and it suggested “Mothers Day MILF.”

At this point I was still basically not interested. Like I said, I don’t watch TV. But then they started showing Android on TV and that is when the scales fell off of my eyes. The first thing they showed that was really interesting was pushing an app from a pc to the TV. They fired up the marketplace. Bought an app and told the app to be downloaded on the TV. In real time the TV started downloading the app. This is pretty cool.

Then they showed pushing a website from the pc to the mobile phone. They fired up the browser on the PC and went to a website. Then acting like it was time to leave they sent that exact site to the phone. In real time the browser opened on the phone with the website. That is also pretty cool.

Next they brought up a google map on the computer and pushed it out the the phone in real time. When you combine these three situations you have something that is extremely compelling.

Imagine being able to get an app and push it between your phone, your pc/mac, and your big screen tv. Also imagine surfing a website and pushing it between your phone, mac/pc, and TV. That is a very exciting situation. To top it off you have the entire Android platform built into the TV. This opens up the potential for an entirely new generation of applications that will be suited to that environment.

Android still very much has a UI issue when compared to the iPhone. It just isn’t as elegant. There aren’t the smooth animations between orientation changes. And the accelerometer only recognized 2 orientations compared to the iPhones 4. The marketplace was revamped but could still use a little polish. But all in all the Android platform has made some serious strides very quickly.

The Google TV announcement part of the keynote was one of the most uncomfortable I have ever seen. It was a total fail. All of the geeks in the crowd were slurping up the bandwidth and these poor guys couldn’t even get the thing to work properly. All the while there were 8 CEO’s backstage getting ready to come out and talk about how great it was. On top of this they had actual tv playing on the two huge screens on both sides of the stage. So we literally saw somebody bonging a beer on the evening news. Some news reports about child abuse and war. Stupid and offensive TV commercials. It was the epitome of evening american television and it seemed to go on forever. I truly felt bad for these guys.

But I can take a step back and look at the big picture and realize that this is the beginning of a big shift for television. TV now gets modern in a big way. It will also grow on an innovation rate with android now. And android is on fire. This is exciting.

Below are some pictures from the first day after party and keynote. Keep in mind this is before they gave us the EVO and my droid’s camera isn’t that great. And yes that is the actual IO podium

Google TV

where to even begin….

On a macro note I think this is the beginning of Facebook really really coming into focus on whatever it is ultimately going to become. Attempting to tackle the semantic web is huge and they are taking a very unique and untried approach. There team is waaay smart and they obviously get the web.

On a micro note my suspicion is that the simple gesture of “liking” something will be really natural and nonchalant. I already “like” things often in Google Buzz. I haven’t looked too closely at the API but there were emails going around today on the HTML5 working group mailing list mentioning that it is based on RDFa. I superficially understand RDF (subject-object-predicate expressions. lame examples: Carlos is 29 or Carlos Cardona has the initials CC). I think I got off point..

On the flip side there are the usual privacy concerns. From what I understand the Open Graph is opt-out. So we will see what unfolds there.

Also I thought it was interesting how Bret Taylor, the engineer who came to facebook with the friendfeed acquisition, played such an important role in the keynote and afterward press session. It seemed like he was #2, which surprised me.

Finally, for a brief moment I wondered if this company wasn’t going to be as big as google in 5 years. Which of course is the cliche and meme going around the web today, but I really did ask myself that.

But I kinda forsee one problem. The link that google reverse engineered, the <a href=”">hyperlink</a>, is fundamental to the web. It’s just natural to link from one document to another, hence the web’s creation, growth, ubitquity, etc. The current web is overwhelmingly a link economy. I don’t know that “liking” things will be as natural or ubiquitous as a hyperlink. It’s not that I doubt that it can be. It’s just that I don’t know if it will have the pervasiveness of <a href=”"></a>.

Double finally, I don’t think it’s a great idea that only one company has control of the semantic web. OpenLike much?

Your thoughts?

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Now that the ipad is launching this weekend without flash video support many of the web’s top video sites are launching an HTML5 stream to make sure their sites work on this new device. This includes youtube, brightcove, NBC, ABC, TED, and many more. This is the coming of age of HTML5 and the beginning of web developers worldwide taking the plunge into the wonderful new world of multi-media that is native to the markup. This is pretty much a starting signal for web developers around the world to start using <video> instead of flash. Never again should your video not work on an iPhone or iPod! Never again will you struggle with complicated hacks to get your video to play. Now you simply add <video src=”" controls></video> and your problems are solved. Right? Hold one second. Last time I checked HTML5 wasn’t even a W3C Recommendation. Which means that there are some parts of it that are not totally complete yet. Which parts you might be asking yourself? Why, <video> of course. Yep, thats right. Even though all of these companies are launching “HTML5″ <video> streams in time for the iPad, the <video> element in HTML5 isn’t even finished. The problem comes with video encoding and licensing. Let’s start at the beginning shall we? Right now there are 2 main ways that people encode their video online. One is Ogg Theora and the other is h.264. Theora is owned by some open source types. They encourage anyone to license and use their algorithm, totally free of charge. h.264 is owned by some big scary lawyer types. They say that to use their encoding algorithm they want to get paid. How much? It varies, but it ain’t cheap. Now that money doesn’t come out of my nor your pocket. No, its companies like Google and Apple that have web browsers or big video sites that pay that licensing fee. They argue that h.264 is the most efficient algorithm to encode with and worth the price if it allows them to remain kings of the cloud. Chris DeBona of Google even said “If [youtube] were to switch to theora and maintain even a semblance of the current youtube quality it would take up most available bandwidth across the Internet.” On the other side of the web is Firefox which is based around an open source ideology. They don’t have any trouble paying the fat licensing fee but they argue that any future startup might not be able to raise that kind of money just to use the h.264 licensing fee thus preventing them from entering the web ecosphere. On that principle alone Firefox has decided to not support h.264 and has went with .ogg instead. There are debates about which encoding algorithm is better. But it appears if those debates are about to be silenced. And that is really what this post is all about. Once upon a time .ogg was the codec that was actually mentioned in the official HTML5 specification. Then on one fateful day it was dropped from the spec all together. At the current moment there is no codec that is mentioned in the specification. It is a figurative black hole at the center of all HTML5 <video>. And it is now being filled with what is becoming the defacto codec—h.264. Last year Google acquired video compression company On2 for around 100 million dollars. Since then many of us have feebly hoped that they would appropriately license their new video codec and then use their overwhelming strength on the WHATWG(Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) to make this the new codec in the HTML5 spec. But alas, our hopes and dreams have gone unanswered. So now we have the iPad and “HTML5 <video>” – and the fat licensing fee.

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So Google pulled out of China. This is a huge deal. There are more people on the web in China than there are total people in the U.S. And if all trends continue the web will ultimately be overwhelmingly Chinese. And yet Google, the King of the Cloud, has decided to pull out. Ethical choice? Shrewd business decision? Precursor to something much larger? We’ll see.

For now Google has posted a “Mainland China service availability” chart. It looks like most of Google’s services are still up and running.

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This isn’t going to be a review of the nexus one. I haven’t seen one in person and I might purchase one, truthfully I am still undecided. Nope, this post won’t be a product review. This is more of an exploration of my thoughts regarding Google getting into the hardware and mobile business.

What does it mean when the internet’s first software company decides to get into hardware? This isn’t a decision to be taken lightly and I doubt that the brainiacs in mountainview did. Consumer electronics is a tough market. The margins are razor thin and your product is practically out of date on launch day. It’s not like software and bits where you can edit a text file, load it onto the web, and bam! you have a million users with feedback to iterate on. Nope, with hardware you gotta deal with atoms. You gotta manufacture, and ship, and store, and market, and sale, and troubleshoot when things break. Hardware is seriously a whole other ballgame than what Google is used to. So why did they do it?

To answer that you really need to understand what is going on with computing. And when I say you need to understand it I don’t mean like “yeah. computers are getting faster…right?”, I mean like “computers are doubling in strength at a speed of about once every 12 months. This doubling isn’t stopping—in fact it is speeding up!”

Google has internalized this. They know better than anyone the metrics of internet usage worldwide. They know that within the next 5 years 3 out of every 4 people who gain access to the web will do so on a mobile device. They know that in the last 2 days the human race produced more information than it did in every previous generation combined from the dawn of homo-sapien through 2003. And they know that the iPhone signifies that “cell phones” are actually high end computers that you carry with you everywhere and all the time. They also know that soon (5 years) wireless will be ubiquitous.

Google points to a “perfect storm” of 1. The cost of netbooks dropping drastically resulting in mass adoption of inexpensive computers 2. More and more people spending 90%+ time in the web browser 3. A sweet spot is forming between phones/tablets and laptops/netbooks. That sweet spot is epitomized by the still unannounced and mythical Apple Tablet.

As that form factor ripens there are going to be 2 major choices. Apple already has the “high end” $1000+ market cornered. Google is positioning Chrome OS and Android to be the other choice. For the 95% of people who don’t buy high end devices. They will be able to get a nice phone, tablet, or netbook running Google software. To grasp the magnitude of this just think Microsoft Windows. And now multiply that times the world wide web! Yeah, now you are starting to get it…

So if Google is so nicely positioned to pick up all this market share from Windows why would they get into the hardware business? The reason that I see is that Android, in all it’s open source glory, is just that—open source. Which means that hardware manufacturers are free to do with it whatever they wish—including forking the code into some android bastard child.

Google can’t allow this to happen and has been forced to step up to the plate and set a gold standard of what an android phone could and should be. Of course hardware manufacturers can still do whatever they want with Android, but their phone will have to compare with the official Google phone, so unless they do something extremely creative they won’t be able to stray too far from whatever model Google lays down.

Google has been talking about cloud computing and mobile for a couple of years now. But with their entry into the consumer electronics market in the form of a phone it looks like that time has finally arrived.

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Registration for the 2010 Google Developer Conference (Google I/O) became available today. The cost is only $100 for students to attend both days! That is just too good of a deal to resist. And seeing as how I only live 45 minutes from San Fransisco….. See ya there!

From the site—”Join us for two days of deep technical content featuring Android, Google Chrome, Google APIs, GWT, App Engine, open web technologies, and more. Google I/O features 80 sessions, more than 3,000 developers, and over 100 demonstrations from developers showcasing their technologies. Talk shop with engineers building the next generation of web, mobile, and enterprise applications.”

There are breakout sessions on HTML5, Chrome, Chrome OS, Wave, and many other things Google.

Last year Google introduced and gave invitations to Wave. They also gave an android phone to everyone in attendance. My intuition is that Google will play off of the 10 in 2010 with regards to the I/O in Google I/O.

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