Sergey Brin has said in the past that Chrome and Android were likely to one day conjoin, but that it was likely going to be a slow process that occurred over time. According to a report this afternoon from The Wall Street Journal, Hiroshi Lockheimer, Google’s VP of engineering for Android, has now been put in charge of overseeing the Chrome engineering team as well.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsek9-KwIHo]
During its Atmosphere Live event, Google’s Sundar Pichai announced that the company’s Drive cloud storage platform has over 240 million active users, up 190 from million since June. The Google executive also revealed that Chromebooks are the largest selling EDU device in the US approaching a 50 percent share compared to 5 percent 18 months ago.
According to a new report out of The Information, the already tense relationship between Samsung and Google has begun to worsen thanks to both of their own lines of wearables. The report claims that Google CEO Larry Page and Samsung Vice Chairman Jay Y. Lee took part in an a “tense” private meeting at the Allen & Co. conference last week in Sun Valley. The meeting reportedly centered around Page being frustrated that Samsung was investing more in its smartwatches running Tizen than the ones running Android Wear.
While unveiling the swag it was giving to developers at Google I/O, Sundar Pichai also announced that attendees were getting a piece of cardboard. It turns out that the piece of cardboard is a makeshift virtual reality headset. The company also released a companion app for Cardboard. Essentially, it allows you to slot your device into a cardboard viewer and look at it through a viewfinder and special lenses.
The result is Cardboard, a no-frills enclosure that transforms a phone into a basic VR headset, and the accompanying open software toolkit that makes writing VR software as simple as building a web or mobile app.
Earlier today, Bloomberg published a profile of Android head Sundar Pichai in which it was stated that Google has several Android TV announcements slated for its I/O developer conference tomorrow. The WSJ has now published another report corroborating the earlier profile. According to the report, Google on Wednesday will unveil at least one “small set-top box” running its new Android TV operating system.
Google I/O is literally hours away and while we expect to see several things at this year’s conference, one of Mountain View’s biggest talking points could be improving Android’s appeal to business customers. To accomplish this, Google’s head of Android, Sundar Pichai is in talks with companies like Qualcomm to develop chips that store confidential information such as passwords and user data, so they won’t be as vulnerable to hackers, according to The Information.
Today during a talk at a SXSW Interactive event, Google’s Android and Chrome chief Sundar Pichai apparently announced that a new Android SDK for developers interested in developing wearables will arrive in the next two weeks (via TheVerge). While Google isn’t announcing any specific products, Pichai made it clear that Google will be approaching Android on smart watches and wearables much like on smartphones. With the new SDK, Sundar said the company plans to “lay out a vision for developers as to how we’ll see this market working.” Pichai also hinted that the new Android SDK for wearables will incorporate wearables beyond simply smartwatches.
“We want to develop a set of common protocols by which they can work together,” Pichai said, “they need a mesh layer and they need a data layer by which they can all come together”… “when we say we say wearables, we are thinking much more broadly”
9to5Google first reported that Google was working on a smartwatch that would rely heavily on Google Now-like features. There have been unconfirmed reports recently that Google as well as some of its close partners like LG have been developing smart watches and wearables running Android. Google also picked up WIMM Labs late last year for its Android smartwatch/wearble platform and SDK and the most recent report claimed that a Nexus smartwatch announcement could come as soon as this month.
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Sundar Pichai at D: All Things Digital conference
Despite widespread reporting that Google bid and failed to purchase WhatsApp ahead of Facebook’s $19 billion acquisition of the messaging platform company, Google SVP Sundar Pichai went on the record during a panel discussion at Mobile World Congress to put that claim to bed, The Telegraph reports.
“Whatsapp was definitely an exciting product,” he said. “We never made an offer to acquire them. Press reports to the contrary are simply untrue.”
The source of the reports that Google attempted to pick up WhatsApp for $10 billion source back to a report by Fortune citing “two separate sources” claiming Google had previously underbid Facebook.
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Google’s Android and Chrome chief Sundar Pichai just announced the official dates for Google’s upcoming 7th annual Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco. While last year’s even took place in May, this year Google is moving up the conference to June 25-26. Pichai also noted that Google will implement a new registration system that will avoid tickets selling out within minutes like last year:
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As expected, Google finally took the wraps off its new Nexus 7 tablet yesterday during its breakfast with Chrome and Android chief Sundar Pichai. While there was no mention of a possible update to its 10-inch Nexus, it appears Pichai has since confirmed in an interview with The Wall Street Journal’s Amir Efrati that a new version of the device would be arriving in the “near future”:
Expect to see new 10-inch Nexus 10 Android tablet (made by @Samsung) in the near future, Google's @sundarpichai tells me
— Amir Efrati (@amir) July 24, 2013
While we haven’t been hearing much about a new Nexus 10, which was first introduced back in October, we did recently hear that Samsung was working on an octa-core Nexus 11 alongside a new 11-inch Galaxy Tab for later this year. Pichai apparently confirmed that next-gen Nexus 10 would again be made by Samsung, and “near future” seems to indicate we’ll likely see the device shipping with the latest version of Android 4.3 sometime later this year.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=GZzS6BxHEns
Later this morning, Google is holding a breakfast event with Chrome/Google head Sundar Pichai where it is expected to announce the new Nexus 7 and maybe even a new “Chromecast” device. Ahead of the event, Google has just published a live stream of the press conference for those of us not able to attend.
You can watch the stream right up above, but be sure to stay tuned, as we will be bringing you everything you need to know from the event, which is set to kick off at 9:00AM PT / 12:00 PM ET.
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Google has just sent out invites for an event next Wednesday, July 24th. The invite says that it is a “breakfast with Sundar Pichai,” which means that the focus of the event will probably be on Android and/or Chrome, which are the two departments that Pichai oversees. For those that can’t make the breakfast or were not invited, it will be live streamed on YouTube as well.
More than likely the event has something to do with Android 4.3 Jelly Bean, which is expected to be a very minor update over 4.2. It’s also possible that it’s the Nexus 7 successor, for which we just saw leaked pricing. We’ll be sure to let you know what Google has to say next week.
We’re live at AllThingsD‘s D11 Conference where newly appointed head of Android (formerly head of Chrome and Apps) Sundar Pichai will be interviewed. You can follow our complete live blog below at 8:30 AM Pacific/11:30 AM Eastern:
I’m not going to lie, this is a bit depressing. Among other boilerplate-type of answers to good questions that Wired’s Steven Levey threw at him, Sundar Pinchai said:
What can we expect from I/O this year?
It’s going to be different. It’s not a time when we have much in the way of launches of new products or a new operating system. Both on Android and Chrome, we’re going to focus this I/O on all of the kinds of things we’re doing for developers, so that they can write better things. We will show how Google services are doing amazing things on top of these two platforms.
We’ll be on hand this week to see exactly what that means.
Some other tidbits from the interview: On Firefox OS: “It isn’t surprising. If we don’t do ChromeOS, someone else will”. On Google-branded hardware: “Any hardware projects we do will be to push the ecosystem forward”.
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Two Google senior vice presidents appeared on stage at the AllThingsD D10 Conference yesterday to discuss all things YouTube and Chrome with co-host Walt Mossberg.
Mossberg asked Google’s ad wizard Susan Wojcicki why the search engine does not find and filter copyrighted material. The topic came in leiu of Hollywood agent Ari Emanuel’s assertions from Wednesday, while at the conference, when he claimed YouTube filtered child pornography, but allowed pirated media content.
“The problem is identifying which copyright belongs to who… is very complicated,” said Wojcicki, while mentioning that filtering copyrighted content is not technical, but rather a complicated business issue. “At the end of the day, in order to know what to do with that content, we need to hear from the copyright owner.”
Last month, we heard from Google’s Senior Vice President of Chrome Sundar Pichai who told Cnet that new, faster Chromebooks are on the way. Today, we might be getting our first look at a new Sony VAIO Chromebook thanks to a Federal Communications Commission filing for the “Sony VAIO VCC111 Series” that references the ability to “start Chrome OS” (via Laptop Reviews). Adding more proof that this is a Chromebook —and not a Windows machine— is the lack of a Windows key and chrome accents on the back cover. However, the VAIO Chromebook does feature an 11.6-inch Samsung display, HDMI port, microphone and headphone jacks, SD card slot, and two USB 2.0 ports. The filing also mentioned a “T25” CPU. Laptop Reviews speculated the CPU could be NVidia’s Tegra 250 T25 ARM-based processor, which would mean it is the first non-Intel processor in a Chromebook.
