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If you want to learn what happened behind the scenes in the tumultuous world of Motorola in the past decade, Chicago Mag does an excellent in-depth feature of the company that is awaiting approval of its sale from Google to Lenovo. Some excellent bits:

Meanwhile, in arguably one of the worst decisions ever made by a major corporate CEO, Zander struck a deal with his Silicon Valley friend Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple. Together their companies created a Motorola iTunes phone, the first phone connected to Apple’s music store. “We can’t think of a more natural partnership than this one with Apple,” Zander said at the time. Named the Rokr, the phone launched in the fall of 2005. Jobs, who introduced it, called it “an iPod Shuffle right on your phone.”

Ouch, a Shuffle…
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Pandora Internet Radio is the latest service to bring its product over to the Google Glass world. The music streaming service’s Glassware app came out of their Hack-a-thon from earlier in the spring, Pandora says, and was good enough to share with Google and ship.

The Pandora Radio app for Google Glass gives users access to stations with the ability to control them with voice commands or the touchpad. Pandora says the voice commands allow you to select existing stations or even create new stations. Actions including music controls like play and pause require using the touchpad; favoriting and dismissing a track also requires using the touchpad for now.

Users can find the Pandora Internet Radio app on the Google’s Glassware section, and Pandora has more instructions below:
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Just under a month ago Google shared a list of cities where it would host public meetings for the Advisory Council to Google on the Right to be Forgotten following the European Union Court of Justice decision in May that individuals have the right to request Google remove information from its search results. With the first of those public meetings scheduled for September 9th in Madrid, Google is today starting free online registration to attend the meeting.

A limited number of seats will be available for members of the public at each Council meeting. We’re opening up the online registration process today — and you can sign up for the Madrid meeting and the Rome meeting. Registration will remain open until five days before the event. There is no charge to attend.

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T-Mobile announced a new initiative in June to offer unlimited streaming of variety of music streaming services on its mobile network without counting against customer data caps. The program, dubbed Music Freedom, supports streaming iHeartRadio, iTunesRadio, Pandora, Rhapsody, Samsung Milk, Slacker, and Spotify over T-Mobile’s network without counting towards a data cap, and today the carrier is doubling the number of supported services.

Today T-Mobile is announcing the addition of AccuRadio, Black Planet, Grooveshark, Radio Paradise, Rdio and Songza to its Music Freedom program. You may recall Google purchased Songza (for what is believed to be $15 million) in July. In addition to introducing the six new music services to the program, T-Mobile has also shared that it will be adding Google Play Music later this year after the service was voted on the most to be included. Full press release follows…

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“Know your competition, but don’t copy it.” Those words of wisdom come from the image above accompanying a message put on the entirely original – not a copy of Facebook – Google+ by Google executive chairman and former CEO Eric Schmidt. Schmidt is promoting his new book with Jonathan Rosenberg called How Google Works due out next month where the billionaire lays out the principles that made Google what it is today.

Included with the lemonade stand image and ‘don’t copy’ caption is another Schmidt line on originality and competition. “Playing catch-up with the competition will never help you get ahead by creating something new,” Schmidt says. Google would be the “hard” boozy lemonade to the competitions’ fresh lemonade. In the case of Google Plus, the booze could be the hangouts or perhaps the photo editing features or integration with other Google products.

Now picture this tidbit from Walter Isaacson’s biography of the late Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs:

“I will spend my last dying breath if I need to, and I will spend every penny of Apple’s $40 billion in the bank, to right this wrong,” Jobs said. “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”

It’s hard to deny that Android started looking a lot more like iOS after the iPhone’s introduction, and iOS has clearly borrowed its fair share of features from Google’s mobile operating system, but there’s no denying that Schmidt’s message could be challenged. File this one with the rest under Talking Schmidt.

At Google I/O in June, Google announced a new line of Android One smartphones that it said would be affordable and marketed at emerging markets, such as India. The Economic Times is now reporting that Google is planning to launch its first smartphones of the Android One program as early as next week in India. The report also claims, however, that the devices will be more expensive than the initial $100 price point Google announced at I/O.

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Google announced on Tuesday that it has acquired cloud-based visual effects company Zync, which provided the rendering technology behind the movies Star Trek Into Darkness and Looper. Zync will be joining the Google Cloud Platform team, bolstering the company’s cloud-based offerings for creative professionals.

Zync Render is an in-house tool that provides integrated image rendering for visual effects professionals, offering users flexible solutions and greater creative freedoms with decreased longterm overhead and startup costs. The rendering tool has been used by over a dozen feature films and hundreds of commercials. 
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YouTube subscribers will soon be able to import videos from their Google+ accounts. This features will be available as an additional option listed above YouTube’s “Create Videos” option. This new functionality was discovered by Google+ subscriber, Nedas Petravicius, but still doesn’t appear to be available to everyone.

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When Google’s $35 Chromecast was originally released, obtaining root access was incredibly easy. So easy that some users believed that it had been intentional on Google’s part, as to allow curious developers to explore the inner workings of the device a bit. Nevertheless, the vulnerability used in that root method was eventually closed. Now, however, developers once again have discovered another exploit that allows root access on the Chromecast.

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We heard last month that there was a new Nexus phablet on the way, code-named Shamu. The device is said to have a 5.9-inch 1440×2560 screen and a fingerprint sensor, and to be made by Motorola rather than LG – and seemed a good candidate for the Nexus 6.

PhoneArena is now citing anonymous Motorola sources as saying that the device will instead be launched as the Nexus X, to avoid trademark issues over the Nexus-6 androids in the Philip K Dick novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep – later turned into the cult movie Blade Runner … 
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It seems as if Google’s Project Ara modular smartphone project is coming along nicely, despite a few manufacturing setbacks. There was apparently a problem with manufacturing devices for those who won units at Google I/O, but Google yesterday announced some exciting developments: the third iteration of Ara is planned to sport a custom-made system-on-a-chip made in collaboration with Rockchip, which is going to be made with the unique form factor of the device in mind.

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Google and Citrix today announced a new partnership that will bring a variety of new enterprise features to Chrome OS powered devices. Citrix’s Receiver app is now available for Chromebooks everywhere and allows direct access to the device’s system resources, including settings for things such as printing, audio, and video.

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arsTechnica has put together a handy look at which manufacturers & carriers are quickest and slowest to roll out an Android update on their older devices. Using the KitKat launch date of 31st October 2013, arsTechnica measured how long it took for the earliest available OTA update for devices originally sold with an earlier version of Android, starting with the previous-generation flagship devices.

The winner for update times is, of course, the Nexus line. Stock software and a head start from being Google got KitKat out the door in just 14 days.

As for everyone else, how quickly they update seems to depend on how complicated their skin is and how much they take advantage of the update mechanisms Google has created …

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