Did Google’s conference succeed? It launched dozens of products and services in its 205-minute keynote, but did the world understand them? I saw some of the smartest journalists in technology struggling to handle the information density. But what’s the alternative? Break it up across multiple days, or even multiple conferences? Google’s breadth presents it with a challenge unique among the tech giants.

Apple? Its launches center around a discrete set of devices. That’s why WWDC works. There might be one radically new product, but then just a set of iterations on what we already know. The screen is bigger, the tablet is thinner, the software gets a new sheen. And since Apple is all about hardware you need to touch to believe, it has to do it all in-person. Journalists and pundits can easily digest the news and offer their insights to the world.

Facebook? It prefers the rolling thunder approach that works because it’s mostly a software company. Releasing things when they’re ready rather than waiting months for an event embodies its “move fast and break things” ideal. It reaches out to journalists almost daily about new updates. When it has something big, it throws a laser-focused, dedicated event like it did this year for content-specific news feeds, Graph Search, and Home. Even when it threw its last f8 developer conference 20 months ago, it kept it tight to just Timeline and Open Graph. The media could wrap its head around the social network’s plans.

Those conferences serve their purposes because they align with the identities of producers. Some see Microsoft’s events as a fragmented mess, as they too embody their producer. Microsost has Build for Windows and developers, TechEd for enterprise, a partner conference, a management summit, and a whole event for SharePoint. By splitting them all up, it never feels like there’s one day where Microsoft rules the world.

But Google has its own identity and it’s causing I/O growing pains. The conference certainly captures the spotlight. The problem is that Google’s vast ambitions have left I/O bursting at the seams. This year’s mega-keynote tried to combine search, maps, Google+, YouTube, Google Now, Google Play, music, games, Chrome, Android, and a new phone. And that was just the consumer facing stuff! Then there were a huge set of developer announcements like a native client for C++, location APIs, game services APIs, cloud messaging for notifications, and a suite of mobile app building tools called Android Studio.

Did you watch the keynote? If so, did you remember all these things? Did you have time to read insightful analysis about them? Did journalists even have the bandwidth to write intelligently about it all? It could take a while to unpack everything from I/O. I know I have at least five stories I want to write. And inevitably things will fall through the cracks as a new week will bring new news from elsewhere.

And it’s only going to get more intense. Google employees I’ve talked to say Larry Page is really pushing his 10X innovation mantra and speedier product cycles. They explain that Google could have saved some stuff for another conference later this year, but by then it’ll already have whole slew of new things ready to show off. Plus, developers and futurists might not be willing to come from around the world for two events a year.

The single, 3+ hour keynote with no intermission did symbolized Google’s big theme of unification. Google wants to show it isn’t just a grab bag of different products. They all piggy-back on each other. Android ties mobile together. Google+ ties people together no matter what other Google products they’re using.

But I/O may be too dense and rich. Like a chunk of chocolate fudge, it overwhelms the senses and leaves you struggling to chew up Google’s vision. It was so mind-boggling it put Wired’s Mat Honan into a psychedelic trance.

The three days of developer sessions that followed the keynote were a success, in that they helped developers develop. But perhaps splitting the keynote into two bite-size sessions would make it all easier to swallow. One consumer keynote (Search, Maps, Google+, Hangouts, Music, phone) and one developer keynote (Android, Chrome, APIs, developer tools). They could be split across two days. Alternatively, it could be one keynote with announcements sorted into these two categories with an intermission in the middle. Either would go a long way to making I/O more comprehensible.

But for now, sticking with a single, epic conference may be the best route for Google to create momentum, convey unification, bring its community together, and impress the globe. Google is determined to innovate faster and deliver the future. The duty falls on us to keep up.

Google is prepping… something. An announced Google media streamer was recently found in the FCC’s testing database. Details are nearly nonexistent as most are held under a confidentiality agreement for the next 45 days. However, the documents released to the public call the device several times a “media player” and that it features WiFi connectivity.

The H840, with a model number of H2G2-42 (a clever nod to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), could be a Nexus Q replacement. After all, Google’s new music streaming service does not work with the ill-fated Nexus Q, nor does Google have a mass-market way to get it into living rooms. Google essentially needs its own Apple TV device.

Mass consumption is the only way Google Play Music All Access is going to be successful. Google needs to follow Pandora’s lead and get its service onto as many platforms and screens as possible. A native Google TV app will likely debut shortly. But Google TV is far from successful enough to do this job alone.

It’s rather strange Google didn’t announce this device at I/O last week. This device will launch within the coming weeks. The FCC will release the rest of the details including the device’s user manual in 45 days, giving Google a rather small launch window.

A $99-ish Roku/Apple TV clone is a no-brainer for Google. Call it a Nexus streamer. It would be a media consumption device, able to serve up Google Play and likely several staple streaming apps like Netflix and Hulu. Use an Android device for the remote. Profit.

Google is facing another competition investigation, according to the Financial Post. The Canadian Competition Bureau has informed Mountain View of its plans to launch a formal investigation of its Canadian operations. It has not yet requested any information or documents from Google but has informed the search giant of its intention to launch a probe.

The Bureau declined to comment on the scope of the investigation, noting that it is obliged by law to conduct investigations confidentially. Asked for comment on the probe, Leslie Church, Google Canada’s head of communications and public affairs, told the Post: “We will work co-operatively with the Competition Bureau to answer any questions they may have.”

The Canadian Competition Bureau administers and enforces Canada’s Competition Act, among other laws. Among the types of behaviour it investigates are abuse of a dominant position involving anti-competitive practices that “substantially lessen competition in the market, or are likely to do so”.

Google’s search engine is by far and away the dominant player in Canada. According to StatCounter data for April 2012 to 2013 Google’s share has declined over the past year but only very marginally, from more than 90% last year to just under 90% in April this year. The second largest search engine, Microsoft’s Bing, took less than 7% of the market in April 2013.

Competition investigation is well-trodden ground for Google. Mountain View has been the subject of a string of investigations for a range of business practices, including a 20-month FTC antitrust probe in the U.S. and a two-year+ European Union antitrust probe into its search and advertising operations that’s still ongoing, pushing into its third year.

The FTC probe ended with Google agreeing to make some voluntary tweaks to its search and ad business and without any fine being levied. In the European antitrust case, Google submitted proposals for changes to its practices back in April. Yesterday Reuters reported that EU antitrust regulators had extended the review period for Google’s rivals to study its proposals after complaints that competitors were not being given as much time to formulate their responses.

If Google is found to have breached EU competition rules it could face a fine of up to 10% of its global revenue.

Google made a relatively quiet announcement today regarding how it’s pushing the developer ecosystem forward around Google Now, its intelligent personal assistant for Android devices. The company has begun extending mark up tools for emails from select partners, which help highlight flight schedules, hotel bookings and various types of reservations, to make sure that Gmail can spot that information and use it to auto-generate helpful reminders in Google Now.

The extension of the platform tools available to Now partners was announced by Google’s Baris Gultekin, who was one of the creators of Google Now, which sprung out of a project he came up with in his so-called “20 percent time.” He spoke with Google’s Louis Gray on the Developer Live video stream which ran throughout the I/O conference this year.

Gultekin was talking about ways in which Google is working to improve the quality and relevancy of the recommendations and data it surfaces. The project sounds like it’s fairly limited for now, but asking for help from the input sources of data seems like a smart way to supplement Google’s own data detection algorithms that are working to flag interesting data for Now’s use on their own data center side. Doing all the heavy lifting themselves might be more impressive, but if reaching out to partners can help improve user experience, then there’s no reason not to extend that hand.

No word yet on whether Google will eventually make those mark up tools available for different types of data or open them up for public use, but it’s easy to imagine a scenario where that happens, allowing developers and startups to provide the option of delivering all kinds of relevant information to users from their apps and services on Android. Then again, that has the potential to become overwhelming for users, so we might see a more metered, gradual approach.

Google’s Vikram Aggarwal, a software engineer working on the Android platform, revealed today that Gmail and Email, the native Android client that still ships on Android devices as well, now has a combined user base of more than 100 million across the Android install base. It’s an interesting stat, because although Gmail and Email only represent two of a multitude of email clients available on Android, it’s likely that those two represent the email clients of choice for a wide swath of Android users.

This means that a 100-million-strong active user base for those two combined is probably a pretty good reflection of the total active user base of Android itself, give or take a few million users. That’s a good figure to get, since we usually see more about total activations, which is a far less accurate measure of how many people are currently using devices. Activations occur whenever there is a full device reset, for instance, and people often upgrade to new phones, meaning their previous activation is no longer an active one.

Google has passed 900 million Android activations, the company revealed at the I/O keynote earlier this week. Put in context of a 100-million-strong active user base for the core email apps operating on the platform, however, we get a picture of Android users which is much more down to earth. Estimates of active Apple devices have to take into account the 500 million sold to date, with over 300 million now on iOS 6. Updated to that version or being sold with it installed indicates there’s a good chance a lot of those are still in active use.

Divining the total number of active users on either platform is one part magic and one part science, and the 100 million is likely shy of the actual total of active Android devices out there, but it’s still another piece of the puzzle.

Google’s major developer conference, Google I/O, went down this week. Was it a bit of a letdown? Probably. Did cool stuff still come out of the event? Eh? Maybe? We discuss these topics and more this week on the TC Gadgets podcast. In fact, we even had Frederic Lardinois join as a guest, along with John Biggs, Matt Burns, Jordan Crook (that’s me!), Romain Dillet, and Darrell Etherington as Bob McKenzie.

Enjoy!

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Intro Music by Rick Barr.

About a month and a half ago, Google switched to its own WebP image format in its Google+ Android app, the company revealed at its I/O developer conference in San Francisco today. This, Stephen Konig, a Google product manager who focuses on WebP and Chrome Remote desktop, and Make the Web Fast team member and Chrome developer advocate Ilya Grigorik said in today’s presentation, is saving Google – and its users – about 50% in bandwidth.

Google+ App For Android Quietly Switched To WebP Image Format A Month And A Half Ago, Saves 50% Bandwidth

Google+ is obviously a very image-heavy service and given that Android can display WebP natively since the introduction of version 4.0, this was a pretty logical move for the team. The team, however, also said that the plan is to introduce WebP to virtually every other Google product, too – and possibly within the next year. The slide the team showed during the session including the logos of YouTube, Google Image Search and virtually every other Google product (and sadly I didn’t catch it in time).

The company made this switch very quietly, just like it did with the Chrome Web Store earlier this year. In the Store, the team reiterated today, using WebP resulted in image sizes that were about 30% smaller than using PNGs.

The current problem for WebP – which can save developers a good amount of bandwidth thanks to its improved compression ratio – is that it’s only natively supported in Android, Chrome and Opera. For other platforms, developers still have to service traditional JPEG or PNG images or use other tricks to display WebP. The WebP team, however, also said that it believes Firefox will support it within the next year, too, and seems pretty optimistic about the format’s future (but then, of course, they would say that…).

Google unveiled its completely redesigned Google Maps product on the web at I/O 2013, and at a panel dedicated to the new Maps experience, Maps User Experience Design Lead Jonah Jones and Engineering Director for Maps on the web Yatin Chawathe took us through what went into creating Maps and the engineering effort behind the considerable change seems prodigious.

Specifically, Jones and Chawathe took us much deeper into two of the main driving concepts behind the redesign of Maps, including “Building A Map For Every Place” and “Explore The World.” The former has to do with customizing maps every time a user clicks on a new location, in real-time and with more contextually relevant information, and the latter involves providing beautiful imagery including via Earth integration directly into maps, and with 3D virtual photo tours.

A Map For Every Place

In making a Maps product that is extremely adaptive to both a user’s personal input sources and to specific locales, Google had to rethink its approach to maps, and it looked to the way we casually share directions as a marker of a good system for surfacing relevant information. When you draw a map on a napkin, you are automatically filtering out the most important information, and doing it with your specific audience in mind. The result is a simplified map, that involves maybe a few major routes, as well as smaller roads, and a prioritization that doesn’t necessarily reflect how important a road is to the general population.

“A map draw for you is great because it highlights aspects and things personal to you,” Jones explained, adding that there’s also nostalgic value in something like a hand drawn map. Google wanted to be able to replicate both of these, and so it took an engineering approach to automate a process that’s normally human-powered.

Google didn’t want to exactly replicate the hand-drawn map, however, since it leaves out a lot of information that you want to still be present in a modern, digital, interactive map. But it did want to subtly highlight and downplay certain map elements, bring to the fore aspects that are useful and fading back others that aren’t as important. To do that, it took a big data analytics approach.

First, for a specific location the new Maps algorithm will analyze the entire set of people looking for directions in that area, and then highlight the routes that come up most often. Then from that subset they’ll focus in even further and weigh more vs. less important routes, based again on aggregated user data. They can see which roads are more popular, and then pop those out vs. the less important ones. Finally the less important ones are cut away, and you’re left with something resembling the hand-written map.

Once those are flagged, however, you could still be missing info on the ground regarding very small routes important to a specific place. Those are then targeted via a hyper local re-labeling algorithm that addresses just the immediate surroundings, adding labels to key routes and taking them away from other locations to decrease clutter and subtly change the focus.

That then informs the UI rendering of the Map itself, which still retains the street markers for all surrounding routes. Lines along routes important to getting there are made bold and lines on less important streets are thinned out, but not removed in case some users still require that information. It’s about drawing attention and changing perspective, not eliminating something altogether.

All of the above takes advantage of the immense processing power in Google’s data center to do the whole thing in real-time every single second, for every single one of Map’ millions of users. Yet the impact on a user’s computing requirements is minimal; Google sends even less data than it did with the previous version of Maps, keeping bandwidth requirements low.

Explore The World

Google’s other big addition to the new Maps experience has to do with bringing beautiful imagery to the web, in the form of both Google Earth 3D flyovers and the new virtual tours that provide an up-close-and-personal view of some prime spots. Those virtual tours also represent a massive engineering effort, one which Chawathe explained in broad strokes on stage.

The virtual tours are a crowdsourced effort, which users may not even realize they’re actively contributing to. The images are drawn from pictures uploaded to Google+, Panoramio and other sources within the Google photo sharing ecosystem.

To get from that group of photos to an actual 3D tour requires a lot more than just aggregating photos, however. Google says it can map not only where every photo in its database was taken, but can also tie each individual pixel in every image to a very specific location using its algorithm, making it much easier to stitch sets together. Once that process is complete, it’s left with a point cloud that can flesh out a region, but that’s a brute force approach, and some art is required to make it look good.

That involves filtering the photos, picking ones that show the landmark in context with its surroundings, ones that show the landmark clearly from visually pleasing angles, pics that capture architectural detail, interesting picturesque scenes in various lighting conditions and more. It picks these photos based on visual recognition tech and their popularity and ratings on Google properties; so an image that gets a lot of +1s on Google+ will be rated over one that’s got none, for example.

Once it has a set of top-quality pictures, it determines an order in which they should appear that makes the most sense. Even then it wouldn’t be smooth as a finished product, however, since there gaps and the transition between angles would involve a lot of bizarre warping and image artifacts that would taint the overall experience. So finally, Google’s algorithm goes back to the larger set of images and picks ones that fit nicely in the gaps. These don’t need to be the best quality, since they’re just filling out the animation.

Jones said that what they’ve built is impressive, but still pales in comparison to what a human artist could achieve manually stitching together their own photo tour. He hopes to bring up Google’s automated process to the point where it’s impressive regardless of the source, and comparable with what humans are capable of working on their own.

In response to a question from the audience, Chawathe also said that Google could in the future look for a way to make its 3D guided tour feature a consumer tool. It sounds like it’s not something Google is currently developing, but putting that power in the hands of Google+ users for instance might make it more of a draw for photography enthusiasts. Google already showed that it’s making efforts in that direction with the new auto-enhance and auto-awesome features it introduced for G+ at I/O.

The World In Your Browser Changes As Fast As The Real One Does

These efforts show how Google is making use of its immense computer processing power to deliver experiences via Maps that reflect a continually changing world. It sounds like this is just the beginning for both of the projects, too, and as with every major change, we’ll probably see more refinement of these approaches as users come on board and provide more feedback.

Google impressed a lot of people when it debuted its Grand Canyon Street View imagery in October. The Trekker backpack used to capture that imagery, which is essentially a backpack-mounted version of the same all-seeing eye that sits atop the Google Street View car.

The roughly 40-pound backpack is not all that uncomfortable to wear, I found out when I slipped the Trekker on. It’s a little top-heavy, and I’m not sure I’d want to risk running at a brisk clip if I was using one out in the wild, but it’s really no heavier than a standard backpacker’s kit for a few days’ journey.

Silverman explained how the Trekker works, including how its camera sensor head gathers images and how those are then stored on a hefty solid state hard drive built into the backpack, where they can later be transferred back to Google’s servers to get started with the process of recreating a hike.

I asked Silverman whether we might see the Trekker make its way to the backs of other beings beyond humans, and he said that they are indeed mulling the idea of strapping versions of it to beasts of burden to help them continue to map the world in images. There are also plans in the works to mount it to remotely operated robots and small vehicles to help get imagery that otherwise wouldn’t be easily reachable by a human Trekker.

He said to expect plenty more to come from the Trekker team in terms of Street View imagery of some of the world’s most interesting – and most remote – locales. Combined with Google’s new underwater street view project, that means everyone can probably get a lot more familiar with a lot more of the world in the near future.

One of the most interesting product demos on display at Google I/O this year was a virtual sky diving simulation built using eight separate computers running Chrome, along with a Kinect-like motion sensor made by ASUS called the Xtion Pro. The Maps Dive experiment was created by Portland-based independent digital agency Instrument.

Developer Ben Purdy explained that they built the impressive tech demo to show what’s now possible with Chrome and how it can be used to create an amazingly rendered multi-display experience that looks like you’d expect it to be powered by current-gen gaming hardware instead of just a loose assortment of lightweight Linux-based computers running the kind of code that web developers are already comfortable with.

Maps Dive provided an experience that seemed at least as accurate and sensitive as your typical Kinect game. Purdy said that it’s really just an early example of things that could be built with the computers we already have, as well as mobile devices. Considering how far Chrome already reaches, imagining this type of experience running on even low-cost Chromebooks and Android tablets does open up a lot of possibilities.

Leap Motion was showing off its still unreleased gesture motion controller for computers at Google I/O 2013. The demo unit allowed you to use the controller to navigate Google Earth, and the functionality felt ready for prime time to me, as this was the first time I’d ever used the Leap Motion. The controls seemed intuitive, and within a few minutes I was flying around the globe pretty handily, though I did have some trouble finding San Francisco.

I asked about Leap Motion’s recent announcement that it would delay launch in order to further beta test Leap, and as you can see in the video the company is keen to note that the hardware is solid, but there’s a need for more testing around the consumer experience. Leap seems very confident they can deliver by their new anticipated ship date of late July, however.

The tech is impressive regardless of whether it hits a little later than anticipated, but it’ll be interesting to see if the extended beta has an effect on how it’s eventually received by consumers.

Google’s underwater Street View launched last September, but Google’s Ocean program actually began six years ago, when one of the founders of Keyhole (which, after being acquired by Google, later became Google Earth), was inspired to also look into mapping the ocean. For several years now Google has been mapping the oceans, but bringing Street View underwater is still very challenging.

“Our goal is to really make all of our maps data more comprehensive by adding more ocean data. We want to take you from your home to the turtle’s home,” Google’s Jennifer Austin Foulkes said. So far, Google has launched this for six locations, including Oahu, Maui and locations around the Great Barrier Reef.

Because there is a strong scientific component to this project, the team set up a strict protocol for taking this imagery. Richard Vevers, director of the Catlin Seaview Survey – Google’s partner in this project – said that the cameras his team uses for this project are very different from those used by Google’s other Street View vehicles. The team had to use wider-angle lenses, for example. Google’s underwater Street View camera has three cameras on its front and takes images every three seconds. One of the cameras points downward, because that’s how images during reef surveys have traditionally been taken. The back of the scooter features a tablet that can control the cameras.

During a typical dive, the divers cover about 2km and take 3,000 to 4,000 images per camera, and the team does three dives per day, each of which lasts about an hour. In total, the team has taken about 150,000 images so far, and Vevers expects this number to grow exponentially over the next few months. In the long run, the team hopes to create diver-less systems that can stay underwater for 12 hours or more. The technology is already available, but it needs to be adapted to the kind of camera system needed for Street View.

In addition to the usual cameras, the team is also testing stereo cameras to create 3D imagery and has recently experimented with doing underwater Hangouts and using Photo Spheres to engage the public.

Every camera system costs about $50,000, and four of them are currently in existence, though two of them haven’t been in the water yet.

To get this underwater data into Street View, Vevers used Google’s standard Business Photos tool. The actual location of the images, by the way, is triangulated. The images, it’s worth noting, are also freely available for scientists.

The team is focusing on the Americas right now, but plans to bring underwater Street View to all of the world’s oceans over the next three years (that’s obviously just a few locations – not all of the oceans…). Another focus for the team is getting more developers involved – both for crowdsourcing data and for developing better reef-recognition algorithms. The existing algorithms can only interpret images from a downward-facing camera, but the team is hoping to create tools for working with all of the data the cameras generate.

Given the threats to the ocean, there is obviously a serious side to this project, something Vevers noted during his talk. Street View, he argues, is an important tool to inform the public about the threats that the ocean’s face today. “People don’t want to protect anything they can’t see,” he said. Most people don’t dive, but there’s no reason why we can’t take them diving virtually. There is no point in doing science, Vevers argues, if it doesn’t get out to the public and policy makers.

There has been a lot of talk about rooting your Glass device, or if it’s even possible. Well, it is. During a Hacking Google Glass session today, the team shared the steps to go through to gain root access for your Glass device.

Only the Fastboot tool for UNIX works, but there have been issues with using the OS X one. An official native dev kit will be available, too, which was announced earlier. If you can’t wait for an SDK to port your apps from Android to Glass, then get your root on.

This will void your warranty, so beware:

The entire process seems to take about 10-15 minutes, giving you warning messages along the way:

After you’ve run through all of that, bam, you get access to the entire data partition. You’re rooted and your device is worth nothing:

One developer has run Ubuntu on Glass, something that only a handful of geeks will try, but fun nonetheless:

“This isn’t the recommended Glass team way of building apps,” said the team, but hacking is worth it, right? When you root the device, Google’s support team will no longer help you if you get stuck. If you’re worried about voiding your warranty, the Glass team also discussed the device’s debug mode, which is much safer.

Google and Facebook working together? They’re actually friends, in no small part thanks to Erick Tseng. The former Android leader, now Facebook’s mobile product manager, today launched the official Facebook For Google Glass app. Here he tells me about how a tiny team designed the app around simple photo sharing and Facebook’s strengthening relationship with Google.

Josh Constine, TechCrunch: What was it like getting Facebook involved in the Glass program?

Erick Tseng, mobile product manager for special projects at Facebook: It was great. I used to work at Google [as the lead product manager on Android until 2010]. We’re very close, but I have a personal relationship with a bunch of folks on the Glass team. It came out of a pretty informal chat with folks on that team. We both quickly came to the conclusion that it would be pretty awesome to get Facebook on Google Glass.

It all developed in just a few months. Two engineers built the whole app. There were no formal designers. Just me project-managing it. We got early access to some developer hardware and Google Glass prototypes. We had a very small team build a prototype [of our app]. We liked what we saw, showed it to Google, they liked what they saw, then we productized it. It was fun to work on a new platform like Google Glass.

“Our starting principle was the user experience”

TechCrunch: What was it like working on a fast-moving development platform like Google Glass? How do you think about what features to include in Facebook For Glass?

Tseng: From a developer perspective, our starting principle was the user experience. What functionality makes the most sense when you have a device like Glass sitting in front of you? What we came up with was the idea that we wanted to do things very simply and easily. You don’t want a lot of text. We started playing with it and saw photos as a very powerful user interaction with Glass. It’s natural that when you take photos on Glass, you want to share them with the people you care about. We wanted to make the photo uploading process as quick and easy as possible, so we focused on that use case. 

As we were playing with Glass, we were really impressed with voice functionality, so we added in the ability to speak a photo description that gets added to your photo.

TechCrunch: There’s a lot of other functionality you could have added. Did you run into constraints on the Glass platform?

Tseng: To be fair, it wasn’t all that much of a constrained platform, considering we wanted to do photo sharing. Photo-taking on Glass is very fast. It’s just one click to share, and one more to decide who to share with. It’s going to be an evolving platform and we’re excited to see what Google has for developers. My expectation is that over time a lot of the user functionality will get easier. 

“When you have an opportunity like this, you jump in with eyes wide open”

TechCrunch: What was it like working on a moving target, where you might not know what the device your app eventually launches on would be able to do?

Tseng: It was fun! When you have an opportunity to jump in on an emerging category like this you jump in with eyes wide open, knowing there will be some dynamics before things start settling in. We went in fully aware that this is very early and still in development, but the opportunity to build on Google Glass was quite thrilling.

We always like to think of massive scale and how we can increase happiness in our users live. With Glass, even though it’s very early, it does feel like the natural evolution of where computing is going. As it evolves from the desktop to phones to computers we wear all over our bodies, it behooves us to start only on any technology like this so we get an early glimpse of what users want.

TechCrunch: There’s no way to read the feed or get notifications on Facebook For Glass right now. Did you consider the balance between building an immersive experience and one that might interrupt and overwhelm people?

Tseng: I think it really comes down to how a device like Glass will continue to evolve in our daily lives and the role it will play. We wanted to keep it simple, but it was a no-brainer that photos are a very enjoyable use case. Starting with that was a very straight-forward decision. We’re excited to see Google’s feedback and get people to tell us what they think, what they wish the device could do in addition to photo uploading and we’ll take that into consideration.

TechCrunch: What’s it like being at Facebook and working with Google? Is there any of the animosity people think there is?

Tseng: We love working with the Google Glass  team. From the very first conversation I had with the team when we said “Wouldn’t it be great if we did this?” to launch was just a couple months. That’s a testament to both teams working very closely together to get this shipped.

More broadly, it’s often forgotten that we have a great relationship. Facebook is one of most popular Android apps today. We already work very closely on that experience as well. And then Home is the latest manifestation of that relationship.

TechCrunch: What about your previous arguments about data portability and who can import whose email contacts or social graph?

Tseng: Data importation? With the Glass team that never came up at all, so I haven’t even thought about that in this context.

TechCrunch: Is wearable computing the future of social networking?

Tseng: No, I think social networking is a broader concept. It permeates everything we do in our lives. Wearable computing is a way of helping you connect more closely and see context about what’s around you, but I think it’s a misnomer to say it represents the future of social networking.

TechCrunch: Are there specific Google Glass features you’d like to see?

Tseng: Oh yeah! I’d like to keep some of those secret for now. We want to surprise folks when they come out. This app is really our first foray into anything like a Glass form factor. We expect to learn a lot.

Google revealed Hangouts, its unified text, video and multimedia messaging platform yesterday during its epic three-hour I/O keynote, but while the platform pulls in Google Talk, Google+ and other sources, it was apparently missing SMS integration. Incorporating texts from your carrier is on the way, however, according to Hangouts and Chat community manager Dori Storbeck, who said as much in a reply to a question  (via 9to5Google)about SMS integration on Google+.

The integration will go a long way to truly unifying communications via the service, which is available on Gmail, Android, iOS and Chrome right now. SMS feeding into the Hangouts stream also means that it borrows a trick from what Facebook has added to Facebook Messenger with Chat Heads on select hardware devices, and it also provides Google with a fairly strong feature advantage over competitors including dedicated mobile messaging providers like WhatsApp and Kik, which don’t pull in content from SMS sources.

When SMS does arrive, expect it to make its way to Android only, as there’s not much developers can do to build in SMS on iOS, as those permissions are not open. Hangouts also dropped XMPP in Hangouts, which doesn’t bode well for Google IM on other platforms and in other apps, but it looks like the company is pretty open to building other protocols into its own service.

Mobile app developers using Google’s AdMob ad network will start seeing a new version that has been rebuilt “in a ground-up sort of way,” according to Jonathan Alferness, director of product management for mobile ads.

The update, which starts rolling out today, also brings AdMob more in line with Google’s other ad platforms. That’s something the company has been working on since it acquired AdMob in 2010, for example by integrating AdMob with AdWords, but Alferness said today is the “culmination” of all that work, and that the new AdMob can be more easily extended with new features, setting the stage for future improvements.

More concretely, Google says there are a number of new features in the current update, including a version of the AdWords Conversion Optimizer, which allows developers to identify the cost-per-acquisition that they’re aiming for. It then automatically runs the ad types that are best-suited to drive the most app installations on that budget. There are also new filters allowing developers to block specific topics or specific ads for showing up in their apps. There’s a new setup for AdMob Mediation for showing ads from multiple networks. And AdMob now supports payment in local currencies.

There’s a new interface, too — Google didn’t show it to me, but Alferness said it fits much better with Google’s other ad platforms. At the same time it will have “a lot of the same tools, a lot of the same functionality,” so developers used to the old system won’t feel like “a fish out of water.”

“We’re continuing to see changes in the actual app monetization industry,” Alferness added. “The platform enables us to grow and pivot and change. You can look at the platform and start to imagine missing pieces — one of the areas where we know that we have more work to do is tracking and analytics.”

However, as AdMob changes, Alferness says the central vision remains the same: “We’d love to be a one-stop place for app developers to come to deal with various Google technologies.” And if mobile apps move to new business models, he wants AdMob to move with them.

You can read more about the update here.

Google’s decision to fork WebKit and launch its own Blink rendering engine came as a surprise when the company made the announcement just over a month ago. Yesterday at the Google I/O developer conference, the Blink team provided an update about the state of the engine. As Alex Komoroske, a product manager on Chrome’s Open Web Platform told the audience, the team has already removed 8.8 million lines of code from the original WebKit repository.

When Google first announced this move, the company argued that it was doing so because WebKit had become somewhat unwieldy to maintain because of the wide range of platforms it needs to support. In the process, WebKit development slowed down for all of the partners involved. The fork, the Blink team told me at the time, would allow them to “remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines—right off the bat.” Clearly, Google has been moving quickly to identify even more code in the WebKit source.

This not just about removing the crud from WebKit for the sake of it, however. The team argues that just over the last month, this move to Blink has already made all of the developers who are working on Blink far more productive than ever. Indeed, they argued that they don’t really need to hire more people now that they are going it alone because the individual developers are so much more productive.

The Blink team is already doing more than just removing code, too. Google also talked about a number of Blink experiments it is working on, including Oilpan, which tests putting DOM nodes in a garbage-collected heap, and Lazy Block Layout, which examines how the engine can speed up the rendering process for large web applications by just focusing on the parts of a site that are actually currently on the screen. In one demo, this system helped the team to bring down the rendering time of a very large page from 4 seconds to 32ms.

The team also noted that it’s already getting support from other companies that want to contribute, including Adobe, Intel and Microsoft, which just yesterday submitted a formal Intent to Implement to the Blink team to bring its Pointer Events API for interoperable mouse, touch, and pen interactions in the browser.

Google I/O, the company’s sixth annual developer conference, got officially underway in San Francisco on Wednesday, and it was an eventful day. It took the company every minute of its epic three-hour keynote to unfurl a laundry list of announcements and updates, seemingly across every product category in its arsenal — from Android, Chrome and Search to Maps, Google+ and Hangouts — each with a fresh coat of paint. We even saw the arrival of Google’s very own subscription music service, today, which is already being touted as a potential Spotify killer.

Amidst Larry Page’s triumphant return to the stage (after addressing his much-discussed vocal issues yesterday), Google’s soaring stock price and sexy smartphone demos, it was easy to miss an important announcement concerning Google’s foray into a considerably less sexy market: Education. (And K-12 education, no less.)

Android Engineering Director Chris Yerga took the stage to introduce Google Play for Education, through which Google hopes to extend Play — its application and content marketplace for Android — into the classroom. The new store, which is scheduled to launch this fall, aims to simplify the content discovery process for schools, giving teachers and students access to the same tools that are now native to the Google Play experience.

Teachers will now be able to search for and recommend learning content by category, grade level, and a variety of other criteria, and will have the opportunity to discover content recommended by other educators, for example. What’s more, every piece of content served within its curated portal is pre-approved by educators before being posted, so that teachers can rest easy knowing the recommended content is quality and school-appropriate.

Google has already begun to recruit content partners, with NASA and PBS among those that have already signed on to make their content available to users when the store goes live this fall. Yerga said that the team plans to begin accepting content submissions from developers at some point this summer.

Today, Apple is far and away the de facto leader in the education space, but with its new educational app marketplace, Google is clearly positioning itself such that it can begin to make a real play at challenging that dominance. To that point, the real key to Google’s new product is the fact that it enables administrators to distribute applications to their entire team. If a teacher wants to shoot content to a couple hundred Android devices, they simply have to type in their group’s name and voila, Google will push that sucker out to everyone on the list.

Another important perk for cash-strapped teachers is that the marketplace doesn’t require them to use credit cards to purchase content. Instead, educators have the option to buy apps and content in bulk and charge those purchases to their account. These are important features for educational users, removing a great deal of the friction around acquiring learning content.

Not only that, but, while schools and educators are eager to bring apps and other digital learning tools into their classrooms, it’s critical for them to be able to manage and to bring some oversight to the content distribution process. Plus, the Android Marketplace, er, Google Play, has had a long-standing malware problem, so that extra layer of teacher control can help get schools over the hump.

While the penetration of Apple’s mobile devices into education is significant, when it comes to other hardware, IT departments don’t want to deal with the hassle of networking iDevices. Plus, Apple products are expensive — and especially for bulk orders, schools will want to turn elsewhere.

Where Google can have a real advantage over Apple is in its ability to combine Google Play for Education with Google Appls for Ed. Small businesses have been adopting Google’s productivity software in droves, and the interest has started to grow among school boards who want to introduce tablets into their classrooms and use Google Apps as the standard.

Together these two products can work hand in hand in the classroom, with each becoming more powerful as a result. In turn this could help create the incentive or leverage that it needs to begin attracting new users.

The biggest takeaway: If it weren’t already abundantly clear, Google is no longer just a search company. The company has been exerting tremendous effort to achieve a unification among its products, not only in terms of design, but in the way its products interact with each other. That is best demonstrated by the fact that Google products now touch just about everyone. In a sense, Google is becoming a utility provider — for both consumers and developers — and, in turn, a data company.

While Apple has long been focused most of its attention on design over the years, Google’s focus on utility has allowed it to build a massive infrastructure, collecting data from across a broad range of software products at a nearly unprecedented scale. For me, there’s no better testament to the utility and wide application of Google’s infrastructure than Education.

Naturally, in juxtaposition with sexy new smartphones and mobile technology, streaming music services and re-imagined social networks, Google’s work in Education tends to end up in the backseat. But, for this reason, Google has quietly (and quickly) gained noticeable traction in Education, thanks to the adaptation of its utilities and gadgets, like Google Apps and Chromebooks, to the learning market.

For example, in February, Google announced in February that Chromebooks are now in over 2,000 schools across the U.S. For awhile now, Apple has grabbed most of the attention in the education space thanks to the rapid adoption of iPads among schools and teachers. Furthermore, when we talk about Google having positioned itself as a provider of essential utilities, there’s probably no better than the company’s recent announcement that the entire country of Malaysia — that’s 10 million students, teachers and parents — will use Google Apps for Education as part of the country’s effort to improve its education system.

Through its Google Apps products, Google allows students and teachers to collaborate in realtime through Web apps, while using already-familiar tools like Google search and Gmail. The other part of this is, Google’s cloud, its infrastructure, allows it to operate its software products at scale without the traditionally high costs. For that reason, the company can make its educational products accessible to cash-strapped IT departments, for example.

With infrastructure that allows it to run its software at scale from the cloud, Google’s products become more flexible. That foundation behind it, with Google Apps having found penetration among small businesses, it adapted the suite to address similar productivity and collaboration inefficiencies in education.

Apply that to Google Play and pair it with Google Apps, and you can start to see why EdTech entrepreneurs and investors, when asked what the biggest trends are in education (that no one’s talking about yet), more than a few have said “start paying attention to Google.”

And with the impending arrival of Google Play for Education, if Google can start to get Android tablets into the hands of kids, it looks like they might just be onto something…

Google Developer page here.

Rodriguez is a a software engineer with Thales, a data security company. He humored us and did an “unboxing” of his new  Pixel. He was hoping to get Google Glass as were most of the people we talked to at the event but he said the Pixel will be fine around the house.

We caught up with a few other people today at the Moscone Center who were happily walking out with their new machines. One woman plans to give the Pixel to her six-year-old daughter. A man from the Philippines said he was hoping for an Android. Another attendee said he wants to use the Pixel  to develop apps.

Nonetheless, these attendees are pretty lucky to get such a sleek machine. Here’s Frederic Lardinois’ review from earlier this year.

Today’s three-hour-long Google I/O keynote came with plenty of announcements, but the company mostly assured us that it is focused on building frameworks that can benefit developers and consumers.

We saw a more unified company that needed three hours in one session to get their message across. Breaking today’s keynote up into two days would have disrupted the momentum coming out of a company that closed the day at an all-time high on the stock market. Key areas of the business saw updates, all relaying the important foundation necessary to move Google forward over the next 10 years.

From search to maps, everything is getting a new coat of paint, a new polished experience and a focus from every team within the company. The only announcement that didn’t fit into a “category” was its new music subscription service. Some are calling it a Spotify-killer, but to us, it seemed like a necessary and inevitable announcement.

Android

The day started out with Android, with the news that more than 48 billion apps have been installed from the Google Play store, thanks to 900 million activations of Android devices.

That’s great news for developers, showing that consumers really care. To make their apps better, Google introduced a new tool called the Android Studio, which makes developing in multiple languages and for multiple screen sizes easier than ever.

The takeaway is that Android is massive, is giving Apple a run for its money and all developers should consider building apps on its platform first, rather than second.

Chrome

That little project that Google worked on, you know…the browser? It’s the No. 1 browser in the world, to the tune of 750 million active users, and Google isn’t afraid to tell you all about it. Oh, it’s also a platform upon which to build apps, so developers should be doing that too.

The takeaway is that if you’re building apps on the web, people love Chrome and Chrome offers all of the open tools you need to build gorgeous things.

Google+

Whether you think that Google+ is a Facebook competitor or not, the 41 features introduced today will get your attention. The stream itself, which now has 190 million monthly active users, is now three-columned and has interactive animations all over the place. Google says that the stream was flat, so it needed a fresh take.

If you’re into taking photos, Google has finally integrated all of Nik’s professional photo suite goodies and will now auto-enhance your shots with something they call “Awesome.”

Not a photographer, but chat with your friends a lot? GTalk, Talk, Google Chat or whatever you’ve been referring to it is gone. Hangouts is in, and it’s an app for iOS, Android and the desktop. It has video and text chats, complete with emoji and presence. We’re just glad that they didn’t call it Babel, which was the real internal name for the project.

The takeaway here is that Google knows that you want to talk to your friends and family. It thinks that if it can integrate features to facilitate your communication from anywhere — at your desk or on your phone or tablet — they have you covered.

Search

Search is getting smarter these days. Google knows that you go to its site whenever you can’t think of something, but it wants you to be able to ask it questions naturally. You can do that on Android and iOS with Google Now, but the company announced conversational search for the desktop today. Speaking of Google Now, you can get public transit information, as well as details on your favorite TV shows, books and video games.

Knowledge Graph, which fires in little snippets of information when you perform a search, added some new languages and statistics.

The takeaway here is that Google wants even more of your searches, but would rather you sit back and relax while performing them. There’s no need to think about how to get the best search result, simply ask a question.

Maps

Getting the gist yet? Google is refreshing all the things to make them easier to use, develop for and discuss with your Mom and Dad. Speaking of Mom and Dad, they probably use Google Maps to get just about everywhere.

Mobile Maps users will get a new experience come summertime, while the desktop experience got such a complete overhaul that they’ve only made it available in preview mode as to not give anyone a heart attack. Want to see it for yourself? Check out our hands-on look.

The takeaway here is that Google Maps has been a force for almost 10 years. It was time to make the product more user friendly, helping you discover new places and not just get from point A to point B.

The rest

Google’s CEO Larry Page made a triumphant return to the I/O stage, a day after discussing his vocal issues. He even discussed a world where cool things could be built without the moonshotters being bothered.

All in all, it was a solid day for Google. There were even fighting robots. The future is bright for Google; the foundation for everything has been (re)laid out. Unification.

We’ll be here for the rest of the week, hanging out with developers and listening to some roundtable discussions. If you want to watch the full keynote, have a gander here: