It looks like the webOS contingent at HP isn’t done losing people. HP laid off 275 webOS employees back in February shortly after they announced their plans for the Open webOS project, and now their Enyo team is being picked apart.

The Verge reported late last night that key members of the Enyo team have left their posts at HP, and will migrate over to Google.

Enyo, in case you’re not steeped in webOS lore, is a JavaScript framework that allows devs to “build and maintain HTML5 applications of any size and complexity” that debuted alongside the ill-fated TouchPad. Considering that the platform is meant to help devs create platform-agnostic apps that can be tailored either for the web or for a mobile device, the team behind it apparently made for an enticing target for Google.

Though initial rumblings made it seem like the entire team up and left, it’s since been revealed that only a handful of HP employees will be making the transition. AllThingsD reported last night that Google has been working out these talent acquisitions on a person-by-person basis rather than swooping in and taking the whole lot of them. Unfortunately, Enyo Senior Director Matt McNulty is one of the people making the transition to Google, and they’re expected to regroup in Mountain View some time next month.

Despite how things sound, it’s not completely over for the project — it’s damned near impossible to kill an open source project once its out in the open, and HP has said that business will continue as usual:

We’re pleased with the traction Enyo has gained to date and plan to continue its development along with the open source community. The Open webOS project is on schedule and we remain committed to the roadmap announced in January.

And what will Matt McNulty and the rest of the ex-HP crew be doing at Google? Surely some of them will end up working on Android, especially given that Android User Experience Director Matias Duarte led up Palm’s design efforts on the little mobile OS that couldn’t until he left just after HP’s acquisition. With Enyo focused on allowing developers to create cross-platform applications that play nice with web browsers, some of that new blood could trickle into Google’s Chrome and ChromeOS divisions.

Of course, this isn’t the only notable departure that HP is dealing with at the moment. The news comes just two days after HP revealed that they would be axing 27,000 jobs in an attempt to save $3.5 billion by 2014.

In what should be a very welcome addition for Android developers, Google is adding subscription billing to its app store.

That should give developers yet another to earn revenue on top of in-app purchases of virtual currency, downloads of paid apps and advertising. It will probably most benefit mid and hardcore game developers, who are more likely to have rabid fans willing to pay for monthly access. It will also help magazine publishers, who are still figuring out how to sell content on tablets.

All of the subscriptions are auto-renewing and can be set with monthly or annual fees. Developers set the price themselves.  There’s also an HTTP-based publisher API that lets enterprise-scale backend servers validate or cancel subscriptions. It’s inter-operable with subscriptions on the web, so users can take their paid access with them across devices and web destinations.

The revenue share is just the same as it is with paid apps and in-app purchases. Google takes a 30 percent cut. When Apple launched subscriptions on iOS, some publishers like The Financial Times balked at Apple’s cut and instead built HTML5 apps to circumvent the fees. Google’s situation is a little more complicated as it relies more on carrier billing, which means most of their 30 percent cut may actually go toward mobile operators.

Google hand-selected a few developers to launch with subscriptions today. One of them is Glu Mobile, which is a publicly traded mobile game developer. They’re best known for “action-adventure” games like Gun Bros and they did just over $17 million in smartphone revenue in the first quarter of this year (which was a pretty impressive 72 percent increase from the quarter before).

Google is playing catch-up with iOS in terms of helping developers make money from their apps. Mobile analytics firm Flurry found that for every dollar a developer earns on iOS, they earn about a quarter of that on Android. Most of this has to do with how Android just has fewer paying customers on file. If you look at revenue on a per-user basis (or how a paying user spends on average), it’s actually almost the same on iOS and Android. So as long as Google can get more payments information on Android users, it looks promising.

Just over a week ago, the jury began deliberations on the ongoing patent infringement case between Google and Oracle. After waiting in the wings, with bated breath, the verdict is finally in, as Judge William Alsup of the U.S. District Court of Northern California dismissed the jury this afternoon after a unanimous decision that ruled in favor of Google’s mobile OS — declaring that Android did not in fact infringe on the Oracle patents in question.

The decision follows an opposing verdict earlier this month, in which the jury in the long-running infringement case found that certain components of Android APIs had too close of a resemblance to code used in Oracle’s Java programming tools. However, the jury ended up splitting on the notion of whether or not Google could in fact claim fair use in its defense (which could have then led to a mistrial.)

The jury’s decision was obviously a laborious one, following two years of a legal back-and-forth between the two tech giants. Oracle had initially filed the lawsuit back in August 2010, in which the company asserted that Android infringed on Java patents that Oracle acquired as a result of its purchase of Sun Microsystems. Google responded by saying that, at the time of development, it was not aware of Sun’s patents and that Android was in fact free to use.

Of course, that decision was only the first act in the three-part deliberations, in which the copyright infringement issues were to be followed by consideration of Oracle’s patent infringement claims (the focus of today’s hearing) and, finally, the damages Google might be liable for were it found found to infringe.

However, much of that speculation was rendered moot today, as a week of deliberation came to a close today at the U.S. District Court of Northern California, with the jury unanimously declaring that Google did not in fact infringe on the six claims set forth by Oracle in regard to U.S. Patent RE 38,104 as well as the two claims regarding U.S. Patent 6,061,520.

Of course, this does not mean that the whole case has been decided; instead, the decision marks the end of the trial’s second phase, which, again, focused solely on Oracle’s claims of patent infringement.

While the jury had previously found that Google was in violation of Oracle’s copyrights, as stated above, it could not come to a unanimous decision on the issue of fair use. Meaning that, although Oracle ostensibly “won” its copyright case, it effectively has a hold on its ability to collect on any of the $1 billion in copyright damages it is seeking from Google — a conclusion that was supported by the tweets of legal reporter Ginny LaRoe, who attended today’s hearing.

And #Googacle The Trial is over. Judge Alsup dismissing jury. Since Oracle won virtually nothing, no damages phase at this point.

— Ginny LaRoe (@GinnyLaRoe) May 23, 2012

On top of that, there are a number of other legal questions surrounding the copyright case on which Judge Aslup has yet to issue a final ruling, although he is expected to come to a decision next week.

Updating

David Lawee, Google’s VP of Corporate Development, sat down for an informative chat with MG Siegler at Disrupt NYC this morning, and it wasn’t long before the conversation turned to Google’s track record with mergers and acquisitions.

“We’ve done 120 acquisitions since 2003, maybe one in 2002,” Lawee said. “And two-thirds of them have been successful.”

Doing the math, that works out to roughly 40 deals that didn’t quite pan out the way the folks in Mountain View had hoped. Of course, some them are more pronounced than others. When asked about Slide — the social gaming company that Google picked up for a cool $228 million only to shutter their services a year later — Lawee noted that Slide was “definitely” in that bottom third.

But what does it actually mean for an acquisition to fail (or succeed) for Google?

When pressed on the issue, Lawee pointed out that each deal has its own particular metrics that Google weighed before they chalked it up as a success or failure. Widevine, the streaming video DRM solution that Google acquired in late 2010 is measured for instance in how many devices it’s reached (and Lawee noted that number has doubled in a year, firmly ensconcing it that top tier of wins for them).

The teams attached to these acquisitions moved on to different roles within Google (and often very fruitful ones), but they ultimately didn’t meet the “four or five” key goals that Google had in mind when they inked their deal. Aardvark was a prominent example — Lawee mentioned that M&A team felt very strongly about the role social Q&A would play in search, but Google’s search organization felt differently. Though the Aardvark team (including co-founder Max Ventilla) found a new home working on Google’s Knowledge Graph, the acquisition is still considered a failure because those original goals were never met.

The pair also tackled Google’s recently-completed Motorola Mobility acquisition, and Lawee was quick to shoot down the notion that it was a spur of the moment deal. He was, though, a bit more hesitant to tackle the notion that the Motorola deal was put together because of their bid to nab Nortel’s patents.

“It’s a complicated area, and it’s not an area that one can just dabble in.” Lawee said.

Oh, and just in case you were wondering, he says Google still doesn’t want to buy Twitter.

Google today launched version 2.0 of its search app for iPhone. Google completely overhauled the design of the app, which now looks and feels more like the app’s iPad version the company launched last November. The new version feels significantly faster than the last one and the new design works especially well for image searches.

In line with last year’s iPad update, the new app now features the ability to easily swipe back and forth between your search results and the pages you clicked on. It’s also become significantly easier to switch between Google’s various search features like images, places, shopping and videos. Whenever you swipe up to the top of the search results page now, a new menu opens up at the bottom of the screen that lets you switch between the different search features.

The app, of course, also still support voice search and gives users access to all of Google’s other services like Google Goggles, Gmail and Google+. One interesting feature is its ability to detect which other Google apps you have installed on your phone and then allows you to switch to them instead of using the company’s HTML5 apps.

Overall, the app is a nice improvement over the previous version. It builds upon a trend we’ve seen lately from Google toward better mobile apps, including the recent  Google+ for iPhone redesign. For the most part, though, most users will likely continue to do most of their searches from their favorite mobile browser.

While we don’t make a habit out of covering every iteration of the Google Doodle, today’s version is especially awesome. The doodle is celebrating the birth date of Dr. Robert Moog, the inventor of the electronic analog Moog Synthesizer. The what?, you may ask. The synthesizer was an instrument Moog created in the mid-1960′s, which took the music world by storm, and was picked up by artists like The Beatles, The Doors, Stevie Wonder, Kraftwerk, and others. It transformed how people thought about electronic music. Instead of producing a “synthetic” sound, as previous synthesizers did, the Moog version created a richer, organic sound. Today, some 50 years later, musicians still hold the Moog Synthesizer in high regard.

And, if you’re curious to see what all the fuss is about, you can try out the Moog yourself now on the Google homepage via a working, playable version of the instrument.

The Moog is a favorite among tech folks because it relied on the invention of the transistor. Because of the technological innovation of the transistor, researchers like Moog were able build electronic music systems that were smaller, cheaper and more reliable than earlier vacuum tube-based systems.

Now on Google.com, using your mouse or keyboard, you can interact with the playable Google logo, turning the dials, mashing the keys, and making sweet, sweet music. There’s even a built-in 4-track tape recorder which you can use to record, play back and share your amazing Moog creations. (Share on Google+!, says Google.)

Also, like many Google doodles, the Moog doodle features a lot of different examples of web technologies in action (which work best in Google Chrome, of course.) For example, the Moog’s sound is generated using the Web Audio API, which Google has never used before in their doodles. As for other browsers, sorry – you have to use Flash instead. Also in use in the doodle: JavaScript, Closure libraries, CSS3, Google Web Fonts, the Google+ API, the Google URL Shortener, and App Engine. (Whew!)

Our only request: while creating your amazing musical creations this morning, consider using your headphones.

MapMyFitness is a veteran of the online health and fitness space, with the first iteration of its website appearing back in the summer of 2005. Since then, the startup has developed a suite of fitness-oriented websites (like MapMyRUN.com, MapMyRIDE.com, MapMyWALK.com, et al) to let users track and store their running, cycling, walking and hiking endeavors, along with accessing a database of international routes, fitness calculators, nutrition tracking, events listings and more. MapMyFitness has long had a stable community of committed users, but over the last year, things have been moving steadily north.

CEO Richard Jalichandra (who joined the startup from Technorati last year) tells us that MapMyFitness recently passed 9 million registered users, and that, collectively, its mobile apps have amassed over 30 million downloads, making it one of the biggest players in the fitness tracking space.

The good news for MapMyFitness, however, has been the recent telescoping growth in registrations (not downloads), with the latest 1 million registrations occurring over the last 40 days. That’s an increase from the 54 days it took for the site to go from 6 million to 7 million users, and the 47 days it took to pass 8 million users. All in all, that’s 3 million new users in the last 5 months, and the CEO says the company is today seeing 25K new registrations a day, significant when viewed against its nearly 7-year history.

It’s based on this recent uptick in activity that MapMyFitness is today launching one of the biggest feature updates the platform has seen since rebranding in 2007. The startup has completely rebuilt its portfolio of websites, and is now beta testing three big new features: Updated routes, personal challenges, and courses, with the main attraction, Jalichandra says, being the latter.

The CEO claims that the introduction of its new feature makes MapMyFitness the only online fitness service to have integrated Google Maps API v3.9 (the latest version of its API) and leverage its full functionality.

What does that mean? While MapMyFitness users could already plan, track, and share their routes, Jalichandra says that Courses adds a notable difference in performance and user experience, enabling users to go beyond the actual route. By incorporating realtime info on traffic, weather, safe routes, directions, realtime elevation, and custom markers, now users can go beyond the route, planning the best Segway route home from work, for example..

Really, the feature is intended to bring MapMyFitness into the gamification/Foursquare era, as it provides both hardcore and casual athletes with both leaderboards and check-ins. Courses offers an automatic “check-in activity” for every exercise logged to track the speed, distance, consistency, and intensity of workouts, ranking users by gender, age, and weigh on the platform’s new leaderboard.

There’s also a group segmenting feature that allows users to compare themselves, leaderboard-style, against specific groups, be they local clubs, friends, or fierce cycling rivals, backed by a points system that incorporates personal best times and monthly consistency, awarding badges to the users with the most overall points on climbing courses, those with the most completions of a course, the fastest time, etc., etc.

Courses will span MapMyFitness’ five primary categories, including cycling, running, walking, hiking and winter sports, as well as hundreds of subcategory specialties (like unicycling) and enables users to create new Courses directly from their iPhones, BlackBerrys, Androids, Windows Mobile phones and iPads.

It also helps that Courses leverages the startup’s database of more than 50 million routes, 1 million climbs, and 30K event courses through realtime processing, allowing users to measure fitness and track progress in realtime or over time.

With RunKeeper on a laudable mission to build “the health graph,” alongside an API that’s already attracted 50+ integrations, big funding, and a platform that’s quickly becoming one of the top destinations for tracking and sharing fitness routines, incumbents are feeling a little bit of pressure.

But, as its name implies, MapMyFitness does maps better than most, especially now that it is powering its new features with Google’s latest mapping technology. According to the startup’s CEO, other than Strava, MapMyFitness is the only platform that offers realtime GPS activity leaderboards, and he thinks that components of the service, like route mapping, the ability to send a route to your phone to route with directions, along with the ability to choose from over 40 sports give its service a leg up on the competition.

MapMyFitness also capitalizes on three revenue streams: Media, digital commerce and subscriptions, and enterprise software, with this diversity resulting in the startup’s revenue doubling each of the last four years, the CEO says, and is projected to triple in 2012. This has allowed the startup to avoid raising outside investment beyond its Series A in 2010 and to grow, under its own volition, to a team of 78, giving it an advantage over its competition in terms of good old human capital.

With its deep database of courses, routes and trails, some added stickiness thanks to leaderboards and check-ins, and some big data collection and storage capabilities on the back-end using postGIS, it wouldn’t be surprising to see MapMyFitness continue in its accelerating growth trajectory. And maybe even find a little funding waiting in the wings.

Also, don’t be surprised if MapMyFitness ends up being featured by Google at some point. My guess would be here.

Courses will be available initially through a private beta test for first 100,000 users
who sign up here. iPhone and Android MMF users will only see superficial changes reflected in its new site — now available to one and all — at new.mapmyfitness.com. Widespread access to Courses et al will be offered later this summer.

What do you think?

As we reported would happen yesterday, Google has today announced that it has closed its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, buying the Illinois-based device maker for $40 per share in cash for a total of $12.5 billion.

As widely expected, Sanjay Jha is stepping down as CEO and Dennis Woodside, Google’s former Americas head, will take the helm at Motorola Mobility, which will be operated as a standalone company. The company says the acquisition will help Google “supercharge” the Android ecosystem: while Motorola will be making devices using the platform, it will also remain open.

Page, interestingly, uses his blog post announcing the deal to focus mainly on the mobile aspects of the acquisition — Motorola also has a substantial business as a media hardware vendor, making things like set-top boxes and other equipment and technology to deliver digital video services.

“The phones in our pockets have become supercomputers that are changing the way we live,” he writes, emphasizing what the future might hold for mobile technology and likening it to Star Trek made real (and those Google Glasses really do look very Star Trek).

“It’s a great time to be in the mobile business…I’m confident Dennis [Woodhouse] and the team at Motorola will be creating the next generation of mobile devices that will improve lives for years to come,” Page writes.

In announcing the acquisition, Page describes Woodhouse as “phenomenal” at team-building, and notes under him, U.S. revenues went up to $17.5 billion from $10.8 billion in less than three years. “Dennis has always been a committed partner to our customers and I know he will be an outstanding leader of Motorola,” he wrote.

Now come more questions: what Motorola assets will Google hold on to, and what will it cut off in the new-look Motorola Mobility — and what will that say about Google’s bigger strategy as an integrated tech player? And will employees go in the process, as we have heard they will?

Google got the chance to buy Twitter, but the search giant passed, says Michael Arrington. “Google hasn’t been interested in buying Twitter since they committed themselves to Google+” says Fred Wilson, Union Square Ventures founder and former Twitter board member, in his fireside chat this morning with Arrington at the TechCrunch Disrupt New York conference. [Update: To clarify, I believe Google missed the boat on buying Twitter, while Wilson simply said Google wasn't interested in such a purchase since it committed to Google+. Wilson did not make a value judgement on Google not buying Twitter, nor did he confirm that acquisition discussions ever took place.]

Now Google+ is widely seen as a ghost town, and not buying Twitter could be a mistake that haunts Mountain View for years to come. Wilson has one of the most envied portfolios in venture capital, with Union Square Ventures getting in early on Twitter, Zynga, Etsy, and Tumblr. But the future might not be as bright. “I don’t think I’m going to be very good at investing in the next big thing. I don’t come from it. I didn’t work in it. The next thing isn’t going to be evolutionary. It’s going to be something completely different.”

Arrington poked Wilson about writing “Silicon Valley could become the next Detroit” in a recent AVC blog post. Wilson explains “I didn’t mean to say [that]. Silicon Valley is the center of the digital revolution. But if there’s another revolution, [like] the teleportation revolution, and teleportation is invented in Mumbai, Silicon Valley might not be the locus of the next big thing.”

Google Lost The Flock

On the war for the future of social, Arrington asked “Do you think Facebook is overvalued?” Despite the newly public company’s share price dropping over 10% from its Friday close price, Wilson defend Mark Zuckerberg’s creation. “Markets come and go, good companies survive. The price of Facebook stock is not that important. Mark built an incredible platform and organization. I don’t think it matters that much if it’s trading at $25 or $50.” But Arrington pressed “is it going to be a half-trillion dollar company?” Wilson admitted “They’re going to have to grow into that.”

Google had a big opportunity to compete with Facebook, but that’s passed. Arrington cites a rumor that Twitter CEO Dick Costolo took the company to Google saying it was raising this big a round at this valuation, and gave the search giant a chance to acquire Twitter, but  ”Google pooh-poohed it”. After the chat, Arrington told me this was when Twitter ended up raising $200 million at a $3.7 billion valuation, so the price Google would have had to pay could have been around there.

Wilson, who’s Twitter investment and former board seat must have made him familiar with the discussion, said Google decided to build social, and hasn’t considered buying something as big as Twitter in the space ever since. [Update: Wilson never confirmed Arrington's rumor, nor did he imply that not purchasing Twitter was the wrong move for Google] Google+ is off to a slow start, at least in terms of people actually using it, not just signing up. But Twitter might not have been the right fit. Google needed a social layer that could integrate into all its product, not just a micro-blogging platform. Still, Google is now a distant third in social, and Twitter’s off the table. Wilson says Twitter’s founders and board are now deadset on it staying independent.

Update: Google better hope it doesn’t end up like Yahoo, who famously reduced its bid to buy Facebook in 2006 and then lost the deal. Now Wilson says Yahoo’s former chief, the disgraced Scott Thompson “was a terrible CEO. The first thing he did was sue Facebook as a patent troll, proving he’s clueless about the way the world works. He was one of a terrible string of CEOs for that company.” There’s still a chance for Thompson to redeem himself, though. “Elliot Spitzer recovered” says Wilson, “I think people can rehabilitate themselves, but it’s definitely not a good thing to be lying on your resume.”

What’s The Value Of Angels?

“I’ve never seen angels being lazy” says Wilson , refuting Ben Horowitz’s claim that angel investors make too much money for too little work. Wilson released a flood of insights into Facebook’s valuation, and the future of Silicon Valley

“Venture capital is not the most risk-taking part of the equation. We wait until things are more developed” says Wilson. He trusts angels and the early legwork and diligence they do. “I don’t know where ‘lazy’ comes from. They’re probably the most important part of the capital stack because they believe in entrepreneurs before VCs do.”

[Image Credit: Joi Ito]

Google always pitched Google Drive, which launched in April after a considerable period of hype, as a replacement for Google Docs. What many users didn’t realize, it seems, is that Google will indeed completely replace Google Docs with Drive later this year. While Drive is still opt-in at this time, it looks like the forced transition is coming soon, as Google has started to alert users that their Google Docs account will soon be “upgraded to Google Drive.”

What’s coming next, according to Google’s official transition documents, is an opt-out phase similar to what the company has done when it transitioned to the new Gmail interface recently. Judging from the messages that many users are now seeing in Google Docs, this phase is going to start soon.

Finally, Google says, “users will be fully transitioned to Google Drive, with no ability to opt out.” Overall, Google expects the transition from what it calls the “Google Documents List” to Google Drive by late summer 2012.

Given that Google Drive is essentially an upgrade to Google Docs with more storage and functionality, chances are most users won’t mind the transition. Unlike the rather controversial Gmail design changes lately (and Google’s move to add Google+ to each and every one of its products), Google Drive is generally perceived to be a genuine upgrade to Docs. Still, there will always be a contingent of users who would prefer the status quo.

It’s been just over nine months since Google announced their intentions to acquire hardware manufacturer Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion, and now it seems that the final pieces of the deal have fallen into place.

According to a new report from the Associated Press, Chinese officials have finally given the Google-Motorola deal their blessing.

China’s official approval of the deal has been a long time coming — Google managed to score regulatory approvals from the U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission back in February (on the same day no less), but China’s anti-monopoly bureau leapt into action just a few days later. That period of intense regulatory scrutiny is a routine part of the purchasing process, as every company that makes more than 400 million yuan ($63 million) in China and 10 billion yuan ($1.6 billion) globally is subject to the process.

Google and Motorola originally expected to close the deal in “early 2012″, and it turns out they weren’t too far from the market. With this final approval in place, Google has confirmed that they expect purchase to be completed some time next week.

With the long process of purchasing Motorola Mobility finally drawing to a close, Google seems to be shifting their attention to the process of selling hardware on their own. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this week that Google was looking at fleshing out the Devices section of the Google Play Store with unlocked smartphones and tablets — all of them “lead” devices —  from up to five major hardware manufacturers. Now that Google will have their own in-house hardware team, it stands to reason that they might soon offer their own devices alongside those from hardware partners like Samsung and HTC.

The folks over at Google just love their Google+ social network and more and more Google+ features have been creeping into Gmail lately as well. Today, Google is bringing even more of Google+ to its email client. With this update, Google is especially focusing on adding a deeper integration with Google+ circles. You will now, for example, see profile photos from people in your circles when you select a circle in the left sidebar. You can click on those images to search for email from a specific contact. In addition, if you really take your Google+ circles seriously, you’ll be happy to hear that you can now use circles as search filters in Gmail as well. Say you want to just see emails from your “friends” circle, you can now just type circle:friends to find them.

How useful these features are for you probably depends on how actively you use Google+. We have, however heard from many of our readers that this incessant focus on adding Google+ to just about every aspect of the Google experience is taking a toll on people’s patience. Instead of focusing on the fundamentals of the Gmail experience, for example, it feels as if Google is getting sidetracked left and right by Google+. As Y Combinator’s Paul Graham rightly noted earlier this year, “GMail has become painfully slow.” Adding more Google+ features to it is probably not making it any faster.

At least one new feature today, though, isn’t fully dependent on Google+ and actually quite useful (though it’s also integrated with it). When you search for an email address now, the search results will highlight your contacts’ details as well, including phone numbers, Google Chat status and email address. If you contact has a Google+ profile, this information will stay up to date automatically.

Almost 115 million households in the U.S. currently own at least one TV set and 36 million own four or more. That’s a huge market and as Apple, Google and Microsoft try to wrestle more of this business away from the traditional content and hardware players, the old-school cable and satellite providers now suddenly have to content with this new group of challengers that, until now, barely registered on their radars. According to Forrester analyst James McQuivey, it’s Microsoft that’s winning this platform war so far.

Why? Microsoft, MCquivey argues, currently has a massive lead over its competitors thanks to its Xbox360. According to a new report by Forrester, the number of U.S. households that watch online video on a TV set is now up to 32.1 million, up from just 24.8 million a year ago. The majority of these households use their game consoles to do so. The adoption of connected TVs is also moving ahead quickly. Forrester estimates that 18.5 million households now use them to stream online video in the living room. Over-the-top set-top boxes like the Apple TV, Boxee and Roku, however, are still niche products, with just 4% of U.S. online households owning one at the end of 2011.

Looking ahead, Forrester estimates that by 2016, 66.8 million U.S. households will have connected their TV sets to the Internet and 89% of HDTVs sold will be connectable.

In this quickly growing market, McQuivey argues, it’s all about who owns the platform. Microsoft is in the lead right now, but still, only 49% of Xbox 360 owners currently connect their consoles to the net. McQuivey argues that in order keep its lead, Microsoft has to push this number to 75% and highlight the numerous video options beyond Netflix it already offers.

Google, says McQuivey in his blog post today, “has to push Android onto every TV device, including the Motorola set-top-boxes it is about to own.”

Apple, of course, is widely rumored to be working on a TV set as well. McQuivey and his colleagues, however, think that Apple shouldn’t just sell a replacement TV. Instead, the company should focus on something more akin to a smaller, 32-inch screen iHub that could be used in the dining room or kitchen to create a central hub for the family to gather around and use a shared calendar, Facetime, and view photos and videos.

[image credit: stevestein1982]

Today, Google is launching one of its most ambitious and interesting updates to its search engine in recent months. Starting in a few days, you will start to see large panels with additional factual information about the topic you were searching for take over the right side of Google’s search result pages. The panels are powered by what Google calls its new “Knowledge Graph” and they will serve two different functions. Google will use this space to show you a summary of relevant information about your queries (think biographical data about celebrities and historical figures, tour dates for artists, information about books, works of art, buildings, animals etc.) as well as a list of related topics. In addition, Google will now allow you to clarify what exactly you are looking for and will use these boxes for disambiguation. Thanks to this, you will soon be able to tell Google you were looking for the L.A. Kings ice hockey team and not the Sacramento Kings when you searched for ‘kings.’

The company has actually been working on the semantic technology that drives this knowledge graph for quite a few years. This specific project, Google told me earlier this week, has been in the works for about the last two years. During this time, the company has been working hard on creating the vast database of structured knowledge that powers the features it is launching today (though Google’s acquisition of Freebase . Today, the knowledge graph database currently holds information about 500 million people, places and things. More importantly, though, it also indexes over 3.5 billion defining attributes and connections between these items.

“Strings to Things”

As Google Fellow Ben Gomes told me yesterday, the company really wants to move beyond just understanding the characters you are typing into its search engine to getting a better understanding of what it is you are really looking for (“strings to thing” is what Gomes likes to call it). To do this, Google is using both its own and other freely available sources like Wikipedia, the World CIA Factbook, its own Freebase product, Google Books, online event listings and other data it crawls, but it is also using some commercial datasets (though Google wouldn’t reveal which companies specifically it is working with here).

Here is what this will look like in practice. Google is currently pretty good at understanding general search queries, but some terms are just too ambiguous. When you search for ‘andromeda,’ for example, it just can’t know if you are searching for the TV series, galaxy, or this Swedish progressive metal band. Now, whenever you type in one of these queries, Google will show you a box on the right side of the screen that lets you tell it which one of these topics you were really looking for. Once you pick the topic, the search result page will reload and show you the results related to what you were really looking for.

So if you were looking for the TV show Kings, the search result page will show you images related to the show, the right Wikipedia entry and links to episodes that are available for online streaming. If you were looking for the Sacramento Kings, though, you will get the latest box scores and other information related to the basketball team.

That’s only one part of what the Knowledge Graph now allows Google to do. The second part involves Google’s new automatically created topic summaries that will appear when you look for a topic that’s well defined by the Knowledge Graph. Say you search for the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, for example. Instead of having to click through to Wikipedia to find out when he was born, you will now see his biographical data right there on the search result page. As Gomes told me, Google, of course, knows what kind of facts around a certain person, place or event people usually search for, so it these summaries will also highlight these topics.

According to Gomes, you will see these summaries about as often as you currently see Google Maps in your search results. To put this into perspective (and sadly we couldn’t get Google to give us more concrete numbers), this launch is significantly bigger than the entire launch of Universal Search combined – and that was one of the company’s largest launches in this field.

What makes these summaries even more interesting, though, is the fact that they also highlight other relevant information. For Frank Lloyd Wright, for example, the summary will give you links to some of his most famous projects, as well as a short list of related people Google’s users tend to search for. Click on these, and you will get to their respective summaries. Inside the summaries, Google will also highlight other entries that you can use to dig deeper (family members, band members, albums, schools, a TV show’s director etc.). This, says Google, will allow you to search more naturally across a topic.

Google is aggregating this data from a large variety of sources. It will typically feature a short summary from Wikipedia or a similar service at the top of the summary and specifically link to the source. For the rest of the data, though, it will often just draw upon its own Knowledge Graph database and not specifically link to where it found a person’s birth date, for example.

In case Google gets something wrong, by the way, you can report errors with just a few clicks.

Looking Ahead

Google, of course, has been adding bits and pieces of semantic search smarts to its search engine over the last few years (and so has Microsoft after its acquisition of Powerset). With Google Squared, one of its recently shelved experiments, it also once launched a pretty ambitious project to understand information on the web and then display it in a table (some of this technology likely lives on in the Knowledge Graph now). Today’s launch, however, represents Google’s most ambitious move in this direction.

As Gomes as told me, now that Google’s algorithms have access to this structured data and can understand it better, the next step will be to understand more complex questions like “Where can I attend a Lady Gaga concert in warm outdoor weather?” For now, though, it is worth noting that this update isn’t about natural language processing and answering questions so much as about displaying relevant data in

It’ll be interesting to see how this new feature will influence how people search and what links they click on. I wouldn’t be surprised if this had quite a negative influence on traffic to Wikipedia, for example. At the same time, though, the disambiguation feature may just help drive more relevant traffic to the sites Google links to as well.

Google today launched version 19 of its Chrome browser for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome Frame to its mainstream stable release channel. Besides the usual bug fixes and performance improvements, the highlight of today’s release is the addition of tab syncing to Chrome. With this, Chrome users can now have their open tabs synced across all of their devices, including tablets and phones that run the Ice Cream Sandwich-only Chrome for Android beta.

This feature will allow you to just pick up your browsing sessions on any other computer or device you log in to. One nifty aspect of this is that Chrome will also sync your browsing history, so even your back and forward buttons will work.

Adding tab syncing is just the latest syncing feature Google is adding to Chrome. The browser can already sync your bookmarks, apps, history, themes, extensions and other settings between machines as well (assuming you signed in to Chrome with your Google account, of course).

It’s worth noting that while Chrome 19 is out now, Google plans to roll out the tab syncing feature “gradually over the coming weeks.”

As part of this release, Google also announced that it paid out around $14,500 as part of its security bug bounty program this time around.

Some people just love Google+ and others just hate the company’s efforts to create a social network and a social layer across all of its services. Google itself seems to be pretty happy with the results it is getting from Google+ so far – or at least that’s what the company is saying publicly. No matter your overall feelings about Google+, though, Google’s new native Google+ app for iPhone is worth a look, especially because it’s hopefully just a first glimpse at what more of Google’s mobile apps will look like in the near future.

So far, the Google+ mobile app was adequate but nothing to brag about for Google. For the most part, it worked (though it did crash at times) and gave you access to Google+’s most important features. Even Google+’s most ardent fans wouldn’t have called it exciting, though.

The latest redesign, however, suddenly makes the app one of the more interesting social networking clients on the market today. Unlike the previous version of the app, which felt like it was designed by committee and lacked luster, this new version almost makes Google+ feel like a Path-like “mobile first” service. It’s highly visual, puts an emphasis on images, and its endless scrolling with new items quickly sliding into place as you scroll down is a nice design touch that feels very different from Google’s latest, often lackluster, design efforts.

Just compare the new Google+ app to something like Currents, Google’s once-hyped Flipboard competitor. It’s not a bad app. It does what it says it does, but it just doesn’t inspire the same kind of enthusiasm as the highly visual Flipboard. The Gmail for iPhone app, which didn’t even work at first, is a better effort but still feels more like Gmail for a small screen than email re-imagined for mobile the same way Sparrow, for example, does.

The new Google+ app, however, finally re-imagines what the service should look like on a mobile device. It doesn’t just try to recreate a version of the Google+ desktop site for a smaller screen.

From what we’ve heard, the new app was developed in-house by Google and the new design wasn’t informed by any recent acquisitions. So Google clearly has the design chops to develop apps like this.

The Google+ team, Steven Levy wrote last year, generally gets a bit more freedom to experiment and make fast decisions than other groups at Google. Maybe it’s no surprise then, that we would first see an app like this come out of the Google+ group. Let’s just hope other teams at Google will look at this app and let it inform their work as well.

Google’s map data has been baked into the iOS Maps app since the days of the first, thick, aluminum-backed iPhone, but that may no longer be the case once iOS 6 hits the streets. Unnamed sources told 9to5Mac that the Cupertino company would instead take that opportunity to reveal their own Maps application, and those early reports paint a pretty impressive picture.

Astute readers may recall that Apple has been on something of a mapping company shopping spree these past few years — what began with the purchase of Placebase in 2009, continued with Poly9 in 2010, and culminated with Apple snapping up C3 Technologies late last year.

As far as the app itself goes, the biggest addition to the mix is a robust new 3D mode that is said to be a straight implementation of the what C3 was already working on when they were acquired. Considering how damned good some of their 3D maps looked, this should be a real treat (assuming the report isn’t just hot air). Also on deck is an updated street view mode also courtesy of C3, and what would a major revamp be without a new app icon?

While C3′s (and possibly Poly9′s) tech seems to have been used in building (or replacing) features, the purchase of white-label mapping service Placebase presumably allowed Apple to build up their store of map data to the point where they apparently feel comfortable giving Google the boot. Apple has forecast their shift away from reliance on Google in other ways, too — about two months ago, Apple switched from using Google’s map data to data provided by the OpenStreetMaps project (even if it did take them a while to own up to it).

While Apple isn’t expected to fully unveil iOS 6 and all the changes they’ve made until this year’s WWDC in June, if you’re champing at the bit for nifty 3D mapping functionality on your iDevice, apps like UpNext Maps may be able to hold you over until Apple delivers their next big iOS update.

Just a day after it announced its well-received updates to its search result pages, here is some more good news for Bing: according to the latest data from Experian Hitwise, Bing-powered searches — that is searches on Bing.com and search.yahoo.com — now account for 30.01% of all U.S. searches. By itself, Bing grew 16% year-over-year and 5% month-over-month and now accounted for 14.32% of all U.S. searches in April 2012. Yahoo grew somewhat slower, but still at a respectable 5% month-over-month and 7% year-over-year.

Things didn’t quite look so rosy for Google, though. Searches on Google.com, according to Hitwise, declined 3% in April 2011 compared to the previous month and were down 5% year-over-year. Google, of course, still remains far ahead of its competition. In April, almost 64.5% of all U.S. searches were powered by Google.

The 65 smaller search engines Hitwise also tracks only accounted for 6.51% of U.S. searches, by the way.

While Bing is still losing money – and while there have been some rumors about Microsoft trying to sell its search engine to Facebook – there can be little doubt that Microsoft’s persistence is slowly paying off and eating into Google’s still sizable lead. Leaving out the searches it powers on Yahoo, Bing itself, of course, still remains a niche player at under 15%, but crossing the 30% barrier is quite an achievement for Bing.

About six years ago, Google launched Apps for Your Domain, which, for the first time, wrapped its suite of emerging cloud products under one umbrella — as a service for businesses and the enterprise. The service combined Gmail, Google Talk, GCal, and Google Page Creator, offering the suite to businesses, non-profits, and schools for free, with no hardware or software required. Thanks to something called “the cloud.” Today, the service is better known as Google Apps and is, according to Google, being used by at least 4 million organizations, with some 40 million-plus end users.

Yet, as the Google Apps ecosystem has expanded, and its tools have become integral to the day-to-day operations of millions of businesses, many are looking for better ways to monitor, control and secure end-user access to apps like Google Docs, Sites, and Calendars. That’s why BetterCloud launched earlier this year — to provide a suite of complementary products that provide Google Apps with enhanced management and security tools for both IT admins and end users. To help it get off the ground, the New York City-based startup has raised $2.2 million in seed funding from undisclosed angel investors.

BetterCloud will use the capital to accelerate the development of its security and management tools and broaden its strategic partnerships, says founder and CEO David Politis, who left his position running the SMB group at Cloud Sherpas (one of Google’s top enterprise partners, which recently merged with GlobalOne) last year to launch the new company. At Cloud Sherpas, Politis helped hundreds of organizations transition to Google’s cloud products, and led the development of its management tools for Google Apps. Prior to Cloud Sherpas, Politis was a founding employee at Vocalocity.

When Politis left Cloud Sherpas, he brought a handful of his team members with him, along with the IP and customers database of SherpaTools, the companion app for Google Apps that offered advance IT management functions for admins and end users that he and his team helped develop. If the concept behind SherpaTools sounds familiar, that’s because it is.

Politis and team are retiring SherpaTools, replacing it with a new and improved product, which launches today in tandem with its funding announcement. The new app, called FlashPanel, is available today in exclusive beta (the first 500 readers can sign up on its landing page), with public availability in the Google Apps Marketplace slated for the summer.

FlashPanel follows the February release of BetterCloud’s first product, DomainWatch, a Google Apps security tool for domains, created to ensure greater visibility and control for IT admins over their users’ activity. Politis says that he thinks the funding represents a validation of the maturity of the Google Apps ecosystem, and, in turn, the need for organizations to get better ways to make the most of Google’s products, both in security and management for admins and end users.

So what is FlashPanel? The management tool offers IT admins comprehensive domain management from one dashboard, giving them access to info on users, groups, and organizational units, Google Docs quota usage, as well as a chart profiling active, suspended, and unused seats.

BetterCloud also wants to provide granular management, as some small companies may not use CRM tools, so the suite offers shared contact management, which admins can use to disseminate information to individual users and sync with their mobile devices, add users to new groups, shuffle them around, remove them, or back up inboxes — which gives them a standard template to make it easier for onboarding new employees and deprovisioning those who’ve left.

FlashPanel also offers email signature standardization so that businesses can create a unified brand image for their employees, and its so-called “App Butler,” which users can enable via Google Chat to retrieve company directory contact info on-demand or broadcast company-wide events.

In addition, the suite includes scheduled and on-demand scans of domain activity, stats, email inbox monitoring, and delegation, as well as a product called Google Gooru, which offer companies training videos on each new Google Apps feature as they’re released, making it easier for admins to get employees using new features without the hassle of having to create their own or hold company-wide onboarding sessions.

As the Google Apps ecosystem continues to grow and develops new products and services around Vault, Chromebooks, and Android, BetterCloud wants to be the end-to-end service that provides the best management tools — for everything from domains and groups to reporting, security and compliance — for Google’s enterprise suite.

For more on BetterCloud, check ‘em out at home here.

Anybeat, a social network that launched last year as a kind of “anti-Facebook” to meet people you don’t already know, is getting bought by another company and is shutting down. The company posted a message to its users a few hours ago noting that it would be closing up operations in two weeks.

The service, which launched as a beta in September 2011 (we offered invites here), was founded by Dmitry Shapiro, who had also founded Veoh and at one point had been the CTO of Myspace. It’s been reported that he is moving to Google to head up Google+.

Anybeat has posted news of the shutdown on its own page in Anybeat.

In the note, Anybeat says that it is getting purchased by another company — it doesn’t say who — and that new owner will be “repurposing it to address a different type of community, and will not be operating Anybeat as is.” It has also offered a link to a Google Group that will let users stay in touch.

It’s not clear how many users Anybeat picked up in its short life, but if you consider that Facebook now has 901 million active subscribers, that’s a pretty high bar to hit for any social network to consider itself as having reached a critical mass.

Anybeat’s unique selling point was its option of anonymity — once something that seemed part and parcel of online personalities, but more recently — not least because of Facebook — replaced by full-on real name usage as the norm for many people. It’s unclear whether any of what Anybeat was doing will be carried over into whatever comes next.

Shapiro has another project on the boil – Uberpaper – a social news-aggregating service that had a similar layout to Anybeat with blocks of text in a scrolled layout (they were created by the same developers, it seems). For now that service appears to still be going.

We are contacting Google and Dmitry to ask about the reports of his career move to Google+, and to ask for more details about who has bought the company — although as of yesterday Shapiro was noting that this information has yet to be disclosed.

If reports of Shapiro’s move are true, could it be Google itself? Is that why the company is suggesting a Google Group to carry on relationships post-Anybeat? It would seem very ironic given that the note below says “I don’t do Google.” In the meantime, here is the note that Anybeat has posted to users: