After previously investing in the company, Google has now acquired Makani Power, a green energy startup that is currently building airborne wind turbines. The acquisition was first reported in Brad Stone’s Businessweek story about Google X, and judging from Stone’s story, the team will join Google X. Google invested $10 million in the Alameda, Calif.-based company in 2006 and another $5 million in 2008. As far as we can see, this also marks the first time Google has acquired a company specifically for its Google X skunkworks.

Stone reports that Google CEO Larry Page approved the acquisition, but as Google X’s director Astro Teller notes, Page said that X “could have the budget and the people to go do this, but that we had to make sure to crash at least five of the devices in the near future.”

The company was founded by Saul Griffith and Don Montague, a former World Cup windsurfer. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed.

Google has confirmed this acquisition and provided us with the following statement from Astro Teller, Google X’s “Captain of Moonshots”:

Creating clean energy is one of the most pressing issues facing the world, and Google for years has been interested in helping to solve this problem.  Makani Power’s technology has opened the door to a radical new approach to wind energy.  They’ve turned a technology that today involves hundreds of tons of steel and precious open space into a problem that can be solved with really intelligent software.  We’re looking forward to bringing them into Google[x].

Makani says it hopes that this acquisition will provide it with “the resources to accelerate our work to make wind energy cost competitive with fossil fuels.” The acquisition comes just a week after the company completed the first autonomous flight of its Wing 7 prototype.

Here is how TechCrunch columnist Matylda Czarnecka described the project back in 2012:

The Makani Airborne Wind Turbines, which resemble mini airplanes, are launched when wind speeds reach 3.5 meters per second. Rotors on each blade help propel it into orbit, and double as turbines once airborne. The blades are tethered to the ground with a cord that delivers power to throw them into the sky and receives energy generated by the turbines to be sent to the grid-connected ground station.

Amazon has reportedly submitted plans for a new futuristic headquarters in Seattle that combines a skyscraper and a tri-sphere, bio-dome-like structure. According to the plans, the structure will be able to hold various forms of plant life and become a place where employees can “work and socialize in a more natural, park-like setting.”

Because, God forbid, employees walk to the park that’s three blocks away.

Here’s an excerpt from the plans (also, hat tip to GeekWire for the find):

While the form of the building will be visually reminiscent of a greenhouse or conservatory, plant material will be selected for its ability to co-exist in a microclimate that also suits people. To encourage growth and maintain the health of the plants, the building’s interior will include high bay spaces on five floors totaling approximately 65,000 SF and capable of accommodating mature trees. The exterior enclosure will be highly transparent and be composed primarily of multiple layers of glass supported by a metal framework. In addition to a variety of workplace environments, the facility will incorporate dining, meeting and lounge spaces, as well as a variety of botanical zonesmodeled on montane ecologies found around the globe. The building will be anchored at either end by publically accessible retail spaces entered from 6th and 7th Avenues.

Generally, it all sounds very cool and very futuristic and very trendy (read: Apple did the whole “plans for a spaceship” thing ages ago). However, it’s interesting to see how the biggest companies in tech are tackling the issue of working in an office or with a more loose structure.

Remember, everyone made a pretty big deal out of Marissa Mayer’s recent policy change that requires all Yahoo employees to work in an office. And just recently she announced that Yahoo would be taking up space in the Times building in New York’s Times Square, which is capable of housing up to 700 employees.

As it stands now, all of the big four tech companies — Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon — favor keeping employees in the office.

Google has one of the best campuses you could dream of, both in Mountain View and in New York, feeding employees free lunch from world-renowned chefs. Apple is working to build out one of Steve Jobs’ final projects, a new spaceship office. Facebook has the same diversions: chess boards, and video games, and basketball courts, and free lunch.

So of course, the fourth horseman in the race, Amazon is devising its own tricks to keep employees at the office as long as possible. It’s a win-win: Employees do more and better work due to a pleasing and comfortable work environment, and employers get more, and better work, out of their employees.

Also, there’s a perfectly good park just three blocks from the new campus.

Here’s the full set of plans:

Amazon’s new HQ design by John Cook

[Biodome rendering via NBBJ]

Google’s Drive app for Android just got a major redesign that brings the Google Now-like card-style look the company introduced with Google Now to its mobile productivity app.

This new look, which Google says is cleaner and simpler than the previews design, will likely be the first thing users notice, but the company has also added a number of new features to the app. Most of these are small, such as the ability to download copies of your files to your Android device, but the new document-scanning features open up a whole new range of use cases for Drive.

The scanner tool, for example, which you can now find under the “Add New” menu, allows you to easily turn paper documents like receipts, letter and billing statements into PDFs. Thanks to Google’s advanced optical character-recognition technology, you can also easily search them later on. This definitely feels a bit like Evernote and it’ll be interesting to see if Google will continue to go down this path in the future updates to the app.

Also new in this version is an updated editing experience for Google Sheets spreadsheets. Users can now adjust font types and sizes for their spreadsheets and change cell text colors and cell alignment right from the application. The app now also finally supports Google’s Cloud Print.

Chrome 27 for the desktop arrived yesterday and today, Google updated Chrome for Android to version 27 as well. While the desktop update mostly focused on improved speed, the Android version actually includes a number of new features. The most important of these is probably the new fullscreen mode for phones. Just like in the iPhone app (or in the old stock Android browser), the toolbar will now disappear as you scroll down.

Also new in this version is a somewhat simplified search experience: searching from the omnibox, Google says, will “keep your search query visible in the omnibox, making it easier to edit, and show more on your search result page.”

The company has been experimenting with a similar feature in the desktop version of Chrome. It essentially turns the omnibox into the Google.com search form instead of switching to the URL for your search and then replicating the search interface it on the search results page. On the desktop, this always throws me for a loop, but given the space constraints on a smaller screen, this will probably allow for a few more lines of search results to show without the need to scroll down.

Other new features in this update include support for client-side certificates (something that’s often needed to connect to enterprise intranets) and tab history support for tablets (so you can use a long press on the back button to bring up your tab history.

What About iOS?

The iPhone and iPad versions of Chrome, the company today announced, will also soon get voice search. This update should launch in the next few days and will allow users to ask questions like “what’s the weather in Rome?” or “How many miles from San Antonio to Dallas?”

Every year Google creates a summary Zeitgeist feature to sum up the year in search data, showing what has been the most popular among its users. Now, it’s rolling out Top Charts, a new monthly series of lists similar to that year-end feature, available on Google Trends as of today. It’s built on Google’s Knowledge Graph, and provides a representation of the actual things people are interested in, rather than just keywords alone.

The charts are broken down in broad categories, and include lists of things like actors, animals, whiskeys, TV shows, space objects and medications just to name a few. The charts display a top five in the main page view, with a relative rating indicated by a colored bar, as well as arrows to indicate whether the items on that list have gone up or down since the last monthly period. You can drill down to see a full list of 10 items, as well as a brief description of each, its peak ranking and the total time it has appeared on the charts. They’re also embeddable, as you can see below.

There are more than 40 Top Charts in total, and that’s not all Google has shown off today. There’s also a very cool animated visualized of the top trending search terms, which indicates what’s being actively searched for at this very moment, with a colorful background and smooth animated transitions. This tool is customizable as well, so you can view up to 25 searches at a time and set it for different regions.

Finally the Trends home page displays elements of each of these, with a hot search term list, and ranking indicators that show popularity over time and by geography for different terms. The changes are not huge, but they do provide some useful data on a more frequent basis than we’ve seen before, which can help people identify what people are interested in, useful for media organizations targeting their content, for instance, or for anyone curious about the pulse of the world’s Googling population.

Google Checkout is being sunsetted as the company focuses on shaping Google Wallet into a viable PayPal rival. Google Commerce announced today that Google Checkouts will be retired on November 20.

Google suggests that merchants who do not have their own payment processing transition to Braintree, Shopify or Freshbooks, which are offering discounted rates for Google Checkout users. U.S. merchants who do have their own payment processing can apply for Google Wallet Instant Buy. Developers selling through Google properties will automatically transition to the Google Wallet Merchant Center in the next few weeks.

News of Google Checkout’s demise comes a week after several major updates to Google Wallet, all designed to attack PayPal’s dominance from different angles by leveraging several of Google’s properties.

These include storing payment credentials in Chrome to make it easier for consumers to checkout and reduce shopping cart abandonment; making Google Wallet available in the desktop version of Gmail; the Instant Buy API, which is designed to streamline transactions for merchants selling physical goods and services; and the Wallet Objects API for merchants offering loyalty programs.

Today, Google updated its Google+ app for Android to get up to speed with all of the changes announced during last week’s I/O Developers conference. In all, there were 41 new updates, including a new stream, photos experience and Hangouts.

The Android version has all of that, and one new feature — a new location section.

Where the Anroid app really shines is with the photo capabilities. The updated Google+ app now has the auto backup, highlight, enhance and “auto awesome” functionality that the desktop version has. It’s really handy to be able to enhance your photos directly within the app, rather than waiting until you get back to your computer or relying on Google to do its magical synthetic wrinkle removal, even though it’s cool.

To make it easier to “make plans and meet,” Google+ has broken “Locations” out into its own section. Now, when you share your location with certain Circles, your friends can easily find you by tapping on that section. Naturally, it drops everyone’s location onto a Map, which makes it seamless:

Location is something that hasn’t been a great piece of Google+ to date. The service currently picks up where you are and asks you for your explicit location, not really telling you who will get to see it. With the Location section and controls, it’s easier to manage and can turn into an experience similar to that of Foursquare.

The stream is getting all of the features from last week, too. The auto hashtags will let you drill into new content, hopefully sucking up all of your free time. It turns the Google+ experience into something like Wikipedia, where you can just keep tapping on relevant content and hopefully find some new people to follow along the way. While you’re not going to get the new three-column layout on your smartphone, the drilling down is actually fun.

We’ll await the iOS update, but expect the same items to find their way into that version. All of these enhancements are made to entice you to do a little bit more in Google+, as the company doesn’t really expect you to jump ship from one network to another. The features are more complementary to one another in this update, giving a better experience to new users, which is the most important demographic for Google to focus on right now. Those of us who have tried Google+ already have our minds made up as to whether it’s useful or not. It’s the stragglers who haven’t seen it from the beginning that need to be wowed.

There is a misperception about the new Google Cloud Platform that the company put into general availability last week at Google I/O. It’s not a brand new platform. It’s what Google has used for years. It is Google’s foundation. It is what makes Google, Google. And now it’s open for the first time to developers and businesses.

Google Platform is new in the sense that anyone can now use it. But until now only a relative few number of people have had access to the platform.

Google Cloud Platform officially launched at last year’s Google I/O. So it still has a lot of hype that comes with a new Google service, especially at an event like Google I/O. It does not have the full set of features that comes with Amazon Web Services (AWS). A customer can get a much deeper service level agreement (SLA) from Windows Azure. Customers can use a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) like Openshift and leverage the Red Hat infrastructure. OpenStack is an option for companies that want to build out their own open cloud environment. Go that route and a customer has a host of vendors to choose from. Red Hat, IBM and HP are just a few to choose from for any number of software and services.

The Power Is In The Network

But there is one thing in particular that sets the Google Cloud Platform apart. And that’s the network that connects the company’s data centers so questions can be answered in milliseconds. It’s what makes it possible for Google to offer 3D maps, translation APIs and Google Glass.

“It is blazing fast,” said Will Shulman, co-founder of MongoLab about the network in a panel at Google I/O about distributed databases. “The other thing – it has a private distributed backbone between all the data centers.You are talking over Google’s backbone, not over the Internet.”

The network speed makes a difference in a few ways. The compute and storage in Google Compute Engine are separated but for the user it appears as if it is all together because it is so fast. It’s like having one giant, programmable super computer that in reality is distributed across thousands of servers.

The network speed also helps make a difference in cost. With the speed, comes the ability to process more data in less time.

Google factors its network into its pricing, much like cloud provider ProfitBricks does. ProfitBricks uses InfniBand, which offers more bandwidth capably than Google’s 10 gigabyte network. Regardless, Google’s fiber network and data center optimization provides the opportunity to offer sub-hour pricing, down to the minute.

On the Google platform,  a customer can double the cores and do a data job in 30 minutes at the cost that it would normally take an hour to do.

Google views data centers as living things. They are not islands but exist in a connected world, connected to devices, other services and other data centers.

It’s this view that shows why Google has to be so considerate of its own network. The world is becoming a vast data fabric. But networking is expensive. Compute and storage costs continue to decrease but networking has not gone down at the same pace as CPU and storage, said Google Product Maanger Amit Argawal in a presentation at the Open Network Summit last June.

What it costs to connect a 10 gigabyte pipe between two regions in the United States is different from connecting different countries in Asia, where the markets are emerging fastest, In the video, Argawal says in the video. Devices are ubiquitous and disposable. Someone can lose a smartphone, buy a new one and be back up in a half-hour. The data is in the cloud not on the device. The services in turn are populating across the network. Put together it’s a virtuous circle. The network needs to be fast and interactive. If not, user engagement will slow. High availability needs to be built into all layers of the stack.

Why Developers Play A Crucial Role

To allay networking and other costs, Google has to continually keep its operations running optimally. The Internet business model means services have to be free or for a small fee. That means Google has to make sure developers are building apps on services that will help Google extend its advertising products and low-cost cost subscription services such as Google Apps.

And that’s why Google Cloud Platform plays an important role in attracting more developers, who in turn help extend Google’s properties.

For example, Google talked at Google I/O about how it offers tools to help developers integrate into the Google back-end. Google Maps, Chrome. Android and BigQuery all have these integrations. Google Glass will get integrated but for now it is not the number one focus.

AWS has a rich developer ecosystem and has a deep selection of services to offer. But Amazon is not an identity and services provider like Google is. Google has more data to offer developers so that will also be a strong selling point going forward for the company with developers.

For Cloudant, a distributed database company, it’s the fact that there is now another community outside AWS that it can tap. “There are a large and growing number of developers on Google,” said Co-Founder and Chief Scientist Mike Miller, who also sat on the distributed database panel.

Google App Engine symbolizes some of the differences that may attract developers. Google announced at Google I/O that PHP would be offered on Google AppEngine. This will make Google available to the scores of web developers who have built their web sites with the programming language. In March Google acquired Taleria, showing its continued emphasis on building out support for dynamic programming languages and need for systems that scale out efficiently.  From Frederic Lardinois post about the acquisition:

The company claimed that its technology allowed developers to “handle more users with fewer boxes, without changing a line of code.” Talaria also claimed its ” server lets you keep your favorite high-productivity languages, but with the scalability and performance you’d expect from a compiled language.”

And then there is the ease of use that Google is trying to offer with Google App Engine. These include back-end as a service tools and more management features that allow developers to focus more on the code then the back-end.

That’s important for companies such as OrangeScape, a “visual PaaS,” for non-developers to build apps. CEO Suresh Sambandam said that means the company can keep its IT team relatively tight.

Google has a network that makes it arguably one of the largest carriers in the world.  But it’s the cost of these data centers that will be its biggest challenge going forward. It’s almost as if Google had to open its infrastructure to extend its distributed network as efficiently as possible while continually attracting developers to scale its business model.

It’s been a little over a year since Google started teasing something it called “Project Glass.” The futuristic, wearable computer that would change the way that you interact with the world was nothing more than a series of rumors for months before it was “formally introduced” in April 2012. Not known for hardware and not having a current bonafide physical device that was popular among consumers, many opined that this was Google’s way of begging for attention. It might have been, and it definitely worked.

In 13 months, Glass has gone from Star Trek fantasy to reality. It’s been quite the whirlwind of activity.

The “wearable computing” age is upon us, and it’s been widely reported that Apple was working on a watch, therefore many assumed that Google was working on a similar device to keep up. This was not the case and Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin took special interest in the Glass project and has been leading the charge going back to when the prototype weighed about eight pounds in August 2011.

Let’s take a stroll down memory lane, because a lot has happened over the past year in Glassland.

It’s real(ish)

The video from Google itself got sent people’s imaginations into overdrive. It was called “One day…” and gave us a glimpse into the life of a daily user of what Google had up its sleeve. We now know that the “One day…” reference had more to do with what the product could become, not what it would be in its first iteration:

The user experience in this video is aspirational at best, as the current iteration of Glass is more of a complement and utility to your day, rather than the augmented reality “enhancer” as this video demonstrates. Still, the elements that make Glass handy are all there, taking calls, getting directions and taking pictures from a new point of view.

Immediately after the video, and public admonishment that the project was real, the press wondered out loud if Apple should compete and that other companies should stand up and take notice. We also now know that the rumored final name for the device, Google Eye, isn’t likely. Good thing, because it sounds way creepier than Glass. We’ll get to more “creepiness” later.

It was clear that Glass was getting a lot of attention, both positive and negative, from the start. Even Jon Stewart did a parody about them.

OK, now they’re really real(ish)

Before Google’s I/O developer conference in 2012, Sergey Brin started showing Glass off to folks like Gavin Newsom. This is the first time that we found out that Glass had a trackpad that would let you scroll through its UI, even though we didn’t know what that UI looked like yet.

Even Google CEO Larry Page got into the act, wearing his pair at the Google Zeitgeist event in London. Was Page making important company decisions without us knowing, using his futuristic eyewear? Probably not, but it was cool to think about.

Holy crap, they’re really really real(ish)

At Google I/O 2012, developers sat in the Moscone Center not knowing what to expect from the company that has been using its advertising business to fund all types of cool projects. After all, who would have thought that a search and advertising company could actually pull off something like Gmail? Or a web browser? And now a driving car? A pair of glasses? Crazy talk. Well, on June 27, 2012, Google fed into that crazy talk with…a crazy stunt.

The man at the helm of Google X and Project Glass, Sergey Brin, pulled off a stunt so memorable, that many of us in attendance still don’t fully understand what we saw.

Brin jumped out of a zeppelin wearing Glass, and participated in a live video Hangout the entire time:

After that, a bunch of people hopped onto bikes and drove into the keynote auditorium. The audience looked at one another, as if to say, “Did this just really happen?”

It was indeed Google’s “Apple moment.”

After Brin took the stage, we were left to wonder if he would then go into full Oprah mode and tell us all to check under our seats for a pair of Glass that would be our very own. Nope. At I/O 2012, the “Glass Explorer Program” was announced, and the first 2,000 attendees that wanted to pledge to pay $1,500 for the opportunity to develop apps for the Glass platform could.

There was no date given for when the device would be shipped, but nobody cared. These things were real(er). Think about it, developers signed up to pay $1,500 for a device that they had never even touched. I was one of them, and even I felt silly. There was something about the cadence that Google had been marching to up to I/O that year that felt right.

Bloggers got to try Glass on for a few seconds, but didn’t get to do anything with them. The hypefest was on. Our founder, Michael Arrington, had a fun, and grounded, thought after the announcement:

“I can imagine in a couple of years we’ll all be wearing these at events. Then a couple of years after that maybe we’ll look back and think we all looked like idiots.”

Perhaps.

They’re real(er)(ish)

After I/O, Google started communicating with its Glass “Explorers” about all of the device happenings, introducing its skunkworks team along the way. Those who joined the program at the conference would get to participate in Hangouts, attend conferences and get exclusive news on Glass. In retrospect, Google set itself up for people to start making fun of those clamoring for the device, whom are affectionately/unaffectionately referred to as “Glassholes.” You see, whenever something is only available to a select group of people, those not inside of that group tend to lash out a bit. Sure, there are those who think that Glass will never amount to anything, but those on the fence had no choice but to attack. It’s kind of like high-school.

As the months went on, the press flirted with Glass, as more and more Googlers starting wearing them on campus. Stories about Microsoft’s “Glass” plans and a reminder of Apple’s wearable tech patents were peppered in, too.

In late 2012 and early 2013, Hackathons were announced, Brin rode the subway wearing Glass and its API, dubbed Mirror, was introduced at SXSW.

OK, Glass. You’re real.

In April, a group of heavyweights in Silicon Valley announced a partnership called “The Glass Collective.” Developers who wanted to build things for Glass, without ads or any means to make actual money, could visit either Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz or Kleiner Perkins, and if their project was interesting enough, they could get funding from all three.

It was at that event that Google Glass team member, Steve Lee, let it slip that developers would soon be receiving invitations to pick their pair of Glass up from Mountain View, Los Angeles or New York City. They could have them shipped, but that’s no fun. Glass was officially real.

In just a few days after that Collective event, the first pairs of Glass for developers were coming off of the production line, the Mirror API guidelines were posted, its companion app for Android was released and full specs were released for the first time.

This “moonshot” that Google had been cooking up in its super-secret X Labs were going to see the light of day, outside of Google’s campus’. People just then started to realize that certain folks would be meandering around town with cameras on their face, and focused solely on how the device would affect them…the ones not wearing the device. The ones not in the “club.” A quick search for the term “Google Glass privacy” shows the same story written by hundreds of reporters, most of them never having worn the device.

I was able to pick up my pair of Glass on April 17th, and it’s interesting to see what the device really is in its current state, as opposed to what we saw in the video released last year. We did a “day in the life” video, showing what I was seeing on the display:

While it’s not as “pretty” as Google’s first teaser video, the elements are all there. In its current state, Glass is a utility that allows you to do some of the things that your smartphone does now. The difference with Glass is that you can do these things hands-free, quicker than before and in a less socially disruptive way.

What’s next for Glass?

For a period of time, we’ll see the same types of stories about how creepy Glass is. At this year’s I/O, none of Google’s executives wore the device on stage or while walking around the Moscone Center. It was its way of turning the “lens” onto developers and saying “It’s time to make this yours.” Still, we heard about people wearing Glass in the bathroom, as if to remind us that not everyone is ready to feed into the hype of the device.

It’s hard to argue with the point that the Glass platform is the most interesting one for developers to iterate upon since Apple’s introduction of the App Store. For the first time in years, these developers are getting a chance to re-imagine their existing services, or build new ones, for a new device. Glass isn’t perfect and will only be as good as the apps that are developed for it.

During this year’s I/O, Twitter, Facebook and a slew of others announced their own Glass apps. The Facebook app is great, while the Twitter app will need more work. As I’ve continued to wear the device while I’m not at the computer, I’m finding myself trying to get away from all of the crazy and unnecessary notifications that I get on my phone and desktop. The Twitter app, for example, sends me mobile updates that I’ve subscribed to, @ replies and direct messages. This simply won’t fly, and Glass users are going to need more granular controls for what pops up on their displays. It’s early though, and these are good learning experiences.

No matter what you think about Glass, you have to admit that the past year has been a good one for Google and its fancy, futuristic device. From a secret pet project to developer-only playground, it will be fascinating to see what happens next in Glassland. There’s no telling when the device will be available for everyday consumers, but I can guarantee that it won’t be until developers have had ample time to explore the possibilities. I do know one thing: If you’re really worried about being spied on by someone wearing Glass, don’t be. You’re not that interesting.

While it was missing the skydiving antics of last year’s event, Google’s I/O keynote last week wasn’t short on product launches. In between the splashy updates to Google Maps, Search, Android and everything else Google announced, the company also briefly talked about Web Components for a few minutes. While Google’s Sundar Pichai noted that it’s still early days for this technology, he also said he believes that “the vision for it is clear” and that it will allow developers to build “elegant user interfaces that work across all form factors.”

Web Components are clearly a topic that’s close to the heart of a number of Chrome developers. Many of them, for example, cited it as one of the Chrome features they are most excited about at a fireside chat later in the week.

A number of Google engineers are also working on Project Polymer, which aims to write a web application framework that’s built upon the idea of Web Components and will allow developers to use the ideas behind Web Components on browsers that don’t even feature all of the necessary technologies yet.

The fact that it made an appearance during the keynote, right next to WebGL and other more established web development techniques, makes it pretty obvious that this is a technology that Google believes has the potential to change how developers write web apps going forward.

So what is this all about? Essentially, Web Components give developers an easier way to create web sites and recyclable widgets on these sites with the help of the HTML, CSS and JavaScript they already know. The ideas behind Web Components have been around for a while (and a few years back, Microsoft backed a similar initiative that never got any traction), but even today, this is still a topic that’s pretty foreign to most.

Building large, single-page web apps with a smart component models isn’t easy today. Web Components help developer encapsulate they HTML, CSS and JavaScript so it doesn’t interfere with the rest of the page and the page doesn’t interfere with it.

It’s worth noting that, for the time being, developers can’t rely on this to work in all browsers. Chrome Canary includes support for Web Components, but it’s hidden behind a number of flags. Mozilla will likely start adding support for it in Firefox soon, too. Most importantly, though, the Polymer project aims to bring the concept to all browsers with the help of a polyfill.

Web Components relies on four pieces – the template element, decorators (which apply templates to CSS), custom elements (which allow developers to create their own elements) and the Shadow DOM (which sounds ominous, but which really just defines how all of the other pieces play together and shield the other three pieces from the regular DOM if necessary).

Putting all of this together, including Custom Elements, developers can suddenly create their own HTML tags like after creating them using the tag. they can also extend existing elements. In addition, Web Components also allow developers to more easily separate content from presentation and the Shadow DOM ensures that the styles you create for the rest of your site don’t interfere with the widgets you build using Web Components.

All of this sounds pretty dry, but if it catches on – and there is no reason to think it won’t – this will change how developers write web apps (Google’s Eric Bidelman calls it a “tectonic shift for web development”) and there are some inherent advantages to Web Components that will also help it speed up the web browsing experience for users. In the end, though, this represents a completely new way for writing web applications and it will probably take a bit before the repercussions of this evolutions fully sink in.

If you want to take a deeper dive into this topic, take a look at this presentation here.

Android UX and interaction design leads Helena Roeber and Rachel Garb gave a talk at Google I/O this year about the Android Design Principles (ADP) they helped create and introduced back in 2012 with the launch of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. The ADP foll three simple principles, essentially “enchat, simplify and amaze,” but there’s much more to those principles that that relatively slippery and non-scientific language might lead you to believe.

In fact, Garb and Roeber have based the ADP on compelling recent research that suggests eliciting negative emotional responses have an outsized effect on user experience, and require lots more counterbalance in terms of positive experiences to achieve a net positive, or even net zero lasting impression.

The Math Of Joy

They cited a John Gottman study that found successful marriages maintain around a 5:1 ration of pleasant feelings to bad, whereas those with more like a 1:1 ration have a far greater chance of ending in divorce. Another study they cited offers insight into team productivity, which suggests that positive-to-negative interactions in a work group setting operating in at least a 3:1 ratio result in much more productive teams than those with more negative experiences. Finally, they suggested that humans need three positive experiences to compensate for every bad one.

A lot of that may sound obvious when simplified; it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that designers and app builders should strive to please their audiences. But the execution of enacting that pleasure is where things get interesting, and where Roeber and Garb’s insight really shone through. It’s one thing to say “okay, we won’t anger a user here, and we’ll make them happy instead,” and quite another to actually do it.

Putting Theory Into Action

Hearing them describe it, the ADP almost came about under a sort of moral obligation. Roeber described how the teams in charge of Android UX and interaction found that tech now has “a profound impact” on all of our lives, and as such, when things go wrong, we have a tendency to blame ourselves, and that can have a subtle but ultimately strong impact on people’s wellbeing.

“All those non-ideal implementations eroded people’s confidence in their own abilities and caused frustration,” she said, describing how even small things that you might not think that much about ultimately leave you with a tick in the negative column if left unresolved. So if you can’t figure out what you’ve done wrong in setting up Gmail on your phone, for instance, that’s something you’ll carry, and something that requires that much more to negate in terms of the overall karmic balancing act.

The example offered by the presenters of how exactly this works in action in Android right now is the visual signal given for when you’ve hit the last of your home screens. Android users will know that you’re greated with a blue glow animation and a visual representation of a page turning up to suggested nothing underneath. It’s clear in what it indicates, but it’s less accusatory or finger-pointing than a text alert, Roeber explained, which can still make users feel admonished and leave them internalizing some blame.

Another example meant to explain how interface elements can not only minimize or eliminate bad feelings, but actually generate good ones was the Google Now art which occupies the search box when you call up Android’s digital personal assistant. It changes based on both location and time of day, and Roeber and Garb explained that in testing, the produced a reaction of wonder and enjoyment not just the first time it was encountered by users in testing, but every time after that as well, thanks to its dynamic nature. Experiences like this rack up positive emotions on the part of the user.

The Interface As The Ultimate Customer Service Rep

Essentially, what Roeber and Garb described in their chat is a means of combining the best possible way of tiptoeing around a potentially negative interaction with positive ones that excite and delight. It’s a simple calculus designed to result in an overwhelmingly net positive experience, the ultimate aim of which isn’t just to minimize the negative impact of the tech we now use constantly, but also to add points in the wins column that can be used to offset negative interactions that happen anywhere in our lives. The ADP isn’t conceived as a way to make using apps not suck, in other words; it’s actually designed to turn Android into a means of spreading happiness.

That’s an ambitious goal, but it’s impossible to deny that the experience of using Android on a daily basis has improved dramatically since the introduction of the ADP. And all of these improvements serve to illustrate how mobile software is perhaps at its best when it’s acting as the idealized customer service representative: friendly and informal, but not overly familiar; attentive to and anticipatory of your needs; gentle and kind when you’re barking up the wrong tree. A truly great customer service experience leaves you feeling lifted, capable, intelligent and happy. It’s more than fair to expect the same out of our device interactions.

Google is under fire in the UK for its tax practices in the country, and a new key witness (who spoke to The Sunday Times) might put them in deeper hot water when he hands over a reported 100,000 emails and documents to the British Revenue & Customs (HRMC) services. Barney Jones, a former Googler who was at the company between 2004 and 2006, says he has material proof that Google’s London sales staff which would negotiate and close sales for the UK market, despite claiming its Dublin HQ handled finalizing all deals.

Jones was prompted to speak out by testimony given to the Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) last week by Google VP Matt Brittin, who said that London-based Google staff were never closing any ad sales deals, though some selling efforts were made there. Brittin had previously gone on record in November 2012 with statements asserting that no one in the London office was doing any kind of ad selling.

The matter of where the deals were finalized is especially important because if a sale closes in London, it’s likely they’d be taxable in Britain, rather than in the extremely low tax-rated Ireland. Jones told the Sunday Times that Google is fully aware of this, yet there are still records of Google staff closing major deals from companies like eBay and Lloyds TSB, but Google doesn’t seem at all certain that any of the documentation will absolutely prove that it has done anything strictly against UK tax law, according to a statement provided by Google Direct of External Relations Peter Barron to the Sunday Times.

“As we said in front of the public accounts committee, it is difficult to respond fully to documents we have not seen,” the statement reads. “These questions relate to Google’s business in the UK going back a decade or more. None of the allegations put to us change the fact that Google pays the corporate tax due on its UK activities and complies fully with UK law.” Google reiterated this statement to TechCrunch when we contacted them for comment.

Ireland uses its lower corporate taxation rate, which is 12.5 percent, or a little over half of Britain’s 23 percent, to attract big names who base their European corporate headquarters there, including Apple and Facebook in addition to Google. The search giant is currently under fire from UK parliament members for its tax practices, thanks to a Reuters investigation that revealed statements it made last November to the PAC about its London operations may not have been entirely accurate.

Amazon is next in the PAC’s sights for its UK tax practices, as Reuters has also recently uncovered evidence to suggest that it, too, is doing a lot of selling through an autonomous London-based unit, despite routing its sales on paper through a tax-exempt affiliate based in Luxembourg. In fact, for most on Google’s footing, avoiding taxes seems to be the exception, not the rule, and a recent piece by V3′s Madeline Bennett explains that even if this fresh round of hearings reveals that these schemes do run afoul of UK tax regulations, it’s unlikely we’ll see situations change all that dramatically. Governments are too dependent on the general economic benefits of hosting big corporations, and get too much out of awarding them contracts, she says, to risk doing long-term harm to those arrangements.

Still, what Jones claims to have would be incredibly embarrassing for Google, especially if it spells out in no uncertain terms that closing deals was regularly handled by Google’s London staff, in direct contradiction to what Brittin has told the committee, but until we see the goods, there’s no telling how deep down the rabbit hole his information actually goes.

YouTube turns eight years old today, reminding each of us in some odd way how young or old we really are. Remember, the company launched back in 2005, the same year that Michael Jackson was found not guilty of child molestation, and Lance Armstrong was winning his seventh Tours De France, and Arrested Development was still on the air.

A lot has changed since then, but YouTube’s growth remains strong as ever. YouTube announced that its community now uploads more than 100 hours of video to the platform every minute. Minute. That’s the equivalent of four days worth of video every sixty seconds.

But of course, the supply makes sense when you consider the demand. YouTube claims that more than one billion people across the world come to YouTube for content each month, which comes out to nearly one in every two people who have access to the internet.

Here’s a little perspective on growth: Two years ago, YouTube revealed that users were uploading 48 hours of video each minute, and last year it had grown to 72 hours. Eight years in, YouTube is still a growing platform, while Facebook may be slipping amongst younger and fresher social niche applications.

Meanwhile, YouTube opens up new possibilities for startups who want to leverage its massive, active user base and content library. Telecast, in particular, comes to mind, as the betaworks company helps makes all those billions of videos discoverable and curated on mobile devices.

Here’s what YouTube had to say about it, in the official blog post:

And so, on our eighth birthday, we’d like to thank you for making YouTube the special place that it is. For showing us how video can create connections, transcend borders and make a difference. For clicking these links even if you aren’t sure what they’ll be, but you trust us. In short, thanks for making us better in big ways and small ones, too. We can’t wait to see what you come up with next.

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…).