IO 13 Impressions

Overarching Theme: Consistent Experience and Activity synch across all devices.
Secondary theme: Saving you time to Live and Love.


What last year's Q hinted at this year's advances make concrete: it's not about the device, it's about your activities registering across all portals on the web, phone, tablet, desktop browser.  Indeed, more emphasis on Chrome, the browser, than ever before.

Google Play Game Services

• allows sync'd save of games state and other data
• manages peer to peer
• probably websockets

Android Studio

•  based on Intelli-J...pretty cool and mo'betta than stupid eclipse.
• Larry not happy about Oracle greed but seems resigned to slogging forward. "It will work out."

Developer Console based on Google + Groups

• App translations service...a pilot program 
• Referral Tracking tied to analytics
• Usage Metrics
• Revenue Graphs
• Beta testing with staged rollouts

Google Play Store:

• UX like TV circa 2000
• Google Play Music All Access Explore
•  Pandora killer
• iTunes adversary
• does it sync?
• $9.99/month US w/30 day trial
• $7.99 if you buy by 30 June

Galaxy S4 unlocked $649 on 26 June

HOUR 2: ON TO CHROME THE BROWSER

ChromeBook Pixel

WebGL Game on Nexus 10 Chrome

WebP also does animated GIF-style pix

WebM VP9 is 1/3 size of h264 avg of 50% reduction

Data compression on Chrome for mobile
    how does this work?

Shopping mobile 97% abandonment

• chrome preserves payment info
• 1-Click equivalent
• Std Payments on Web session

Web Components

•     Toolkit for Web Components--Open Source
•     How does this work?

Racer

•     Google Compute engine
•     Websockets

Free Pixel's all around...that's $1300 * 6000 attendees == $7.8M

Play for Education

•     Google Attacks the Education Market
•     developer.android.com/edu
•     Cromebooks going mainstream in edu--Malaysia 4G

New Google + Design with depth Looking ahead.

    related hashtags
        auto tag
        ranked search
        card flip to see
        image analysis/knowledge graf recognition
            eiffel tower example
   
    Hangouts
       

Google gets it: Personal Computing...not personal computers

   
Hangouts App?

Camera + Cloud:
    15GB Backup
    hilite...Google picks the best pictures
        driop blurry
        drop dupes
        drop bad exposure
        looks for famous locations
        looks for smiles
        looks for aesthetics
        social boost for people important to you
    Enhance
        Auto-enhance
            tonal distribution
            skin softening
            noise reduction
            structure
            ...etc.
    Auto Awesome
        auto-gen a animate WebP
        gifted this afternoon
       

Search
    Knowledge Graph
        ...at the top of the search
    OK Glass gets OK Google companion
    Google Now
    Hot-Wording: OK Google
Maps
    Pins start to go away
    Tufte a happy man: the map is the UI
    personalized maps
    clicks cause customisation of map
    public transit details...great for planning..hard for ad hoc
    Google Earth via webGL with no plugins
    near real-time photosphere submission
    Whole Earth realtime clouds
    Maps leads to Whole Universe
  

Larry Page
    Creating seamless experience of automated cars drives scale.
    Mapping and car is same tech.
    Drives Data centers, searching and storage.
    Done by writing small checks that don't affect business model
    Do experiences that make happy users
    Non-incremental thinking
    Law not keeping up with rate of change
    Geeks need to gointo other areas and speed them up
    Build mechanisms to allow experimentation...Burning Man
    Beta Test the effect on Society...humble launch and see effects
    Do the tech,let it disrupt, take advantage of gaps in the law
    Should crowdsource his voice but it screws his insurance
    2-3 years for smartphones to penetrate India and Africa
    He can almost run Google from his phone.
  
 Me:

• Google Attacks the Education Market...taking Apple on in the heartland
• Simple Chinese == People Republic and Traditional Chinese == Taiwan. That'll go over big in Peking
• Google Maps Offers? You already shorted Groupon--right?
• Google Maps meet Tufte's infinitely scalable information
• Google, not Apple, not Microsoft, is the Microsoft of the next decade.

• Important to not let AI derail personal Serendipity.  The pseudo- in the pseudo-randomness of my mind is...well...me. I would invoke Gide: Please do not understand me too quickly. Actually got question from audience. Larry not concerned...under your control. Your saved time greater than time spent mislead by Google.  Better to overcome your ignorance, like it or not. Then you can feel free to introduce randomness.

• US needs to get off its fat ass and get moving.
•  
• US tapping this gen of geeks to build next gen for the world. We all know what happens...our skills atrophy...they leapfrog.

• Transitioning from computers to computing, from nouns to verbs, not a web of objects but a web of actions
• Hard not to 'trust' Sergei and Larry, given the alternatives. I was especially touched by the repeated note of frustration when Larry talked about Google Health and other initiatives abandoned because the regulatory environment was insurmountable.  In some ways this dovetails with the inability of soceity and the law to get up to net speed.  He suggested some of us need to go into other professions to help speed them up--like government.  Parallel to this his call for a social beta-land for testing new tech ideas before they are widely deployed.  As uit is the only recourse is to disrupt and watch for consequences, intended and un-.

PC v Mac et. al. 30 years later...

What's become apparent since the release of the iPad is how little people put in to the systems and how much they take out.

Turns out 80% of 'computing' was reading and viewing and 20% was 'working' with data and spreadsheets and non-linear editing.

You don't need a keyboard, mouse and supercomputer to read, write and browse--you just need a convenient screen and good graphics.

You say you're a gamer? Get an XBox.

What brand should you buy? Whatever you can afford.

It's the Ford v Chevy debate all over.  There just isn't that much difference on the upside or down.  Buy what turns you on. It's a matter of taste and who you like to run with. Then spit on the competition.

I stand here with all of them arrayed in front of me. Mac, PC, Win 7, Win 8, iPhone, iPad, Nexus 7.  They are all cool gadgets and they all have peculiarities.  I get to have them all because I design and develop for them.

But what if I didn't.  What if I was just Joe Citizen and had to choose just one?

It would probably be the MS Surface or Acer W700 with Start8  running to skip the ColorTile/Metro UI.  That gets me a full computer within the form and function factor of an iPad 1 for ~a kilobuck.

Win8 Metro is great on a phone--better than iPhone--and not bad on a tablet but makes no sense on a desktop--touchscreen desktops make no sense on a desktop either, as mfgrs will admit in a few product cycles by quietly dropping them.

If one were looking ahead it would be wise to reflect on what BlackBerry chief Thorsten Heins recently said: slabs will be dead in half a decade.  That's not as looney as it first sounds.

By the time your current hardware fails--or gets too grunged-up to admit you own it--the devices themselves will be trending towards insignificance.  You'll no more think about 'computers' as things to be purchased and owned and carried than you do lunch.  The ability to compute, to do all the things we ascribe to the physical machines, will be ubiquitous.  That, after all, is what you pay for--other than the bling effect--the abilities the computing devices confer.

What will distinguish each of us is our subscription level and the powers that confers.  Maybe you get a little lapel button that marks you as an Apple Platinum Subscriber.  Google Glass will be built-in to your glasses, your contacts or you corneal implants.

Only poor people will own computers.

Storytelling: An Introduction

"Things are pretty, graceful, rich, elegant, handsome, but until they speak to the imagination, not yet beautiful."  --Emerson

Until I was forty-two I was an impoverished professional, college-trained  storyteller and part-time writing teacher at San Francisco State. Then I wrote something completely different, a software program, and life changed.  Seriously: my life, your life, life on this planet, the only life we know, changed, overnight.  It was the early eighties and software changed life forever for everyone--I just happened to be there, at the beginning.  That would have been a completely different story if there hadn't come a wave of renewed interest in 'storytelling' as a business strategy and investment opportunity.  And where there are business strategies and money to be had there is software to be conceived, designed and written, which is what I have been doing for decades since.

Now, suddenly, I find myself in meetings with entrepreneurs, marketers, media experts, all on the make, as usual, over The Next Big Thing,  and all bubbling with enthusiasm for storytelling and Big Data, storytelling and communications, storytelling and social networks.  And the one thing they all have in common, as they pursue TNBT, is they have not a clue what storytelling actually is. Oh, they recognize a story when they hear one; they can tell stories, too--personal stories of triumph, opportunity, poor timing, thwarted ambition.  But they haven't the slightest notion how stories are made, or what's required in the telling; they cannot tell you, me, or one another, what defines a narrative, or when a story is not a story, but simply expositive writing.  They certainly cannot explain how to do any of that with video.   All of which would be fine by me if they didn't resist wanting to know.

Willful ignorance has certain advantages when selling TNBT to investors.  But that ignorance can be a real disadvantage designing actual products and services. And that ignorance is deadly when you finally come to market. They were talking storytelling: crowd-sourced storytelling, storytelling beyond PowerPoint, transmedia storytelling.  But what they were describing were web-based non-linear editing and collaboration on the iPhone.  They were describing tools.  It was as if they saw me writing in a notebook with a pencil and tried to upsell me a pen with no idea what I was trying to capture on paper.  Got a smartphone?  You can be the next Spielberg--just download our software and sign up.  Record yourself and conquer the world via YouTube.

Don't misunderstand me; I wrote that first software application to retrieve a lost novel from the damaged floppy disk on which it was irretrievably stored.  Anyone who has hand-written and transcribed a 600 page manuscript, then consumed a carton of whiteout typing out six revisions, hails the day the word-processor and daisy-wheel printer arrived--and rues the first time their hard drive died with no backup. Word processing certainly made delivering clean manuscripts easier.  But the word processing tools had no good effect on actual storytelling.

Tools in the hands of people who know what to do with them can produce things that appeal to the imagination, that are, to Emerson's mind,  truly beautiful.  But in untrained hands good tools are wasted; they produce garbage.

There is a connection between storytelling and writing software we will get to.  But, for now, I am going to turn back the clock to where I started, over three decades ago,  before software, to that time when I spent several evenings each week in the company of eager minds, exploring together a few basic questions:

• What is a story?
• How are stories made?
• How are stories told? 
• What qualities make a story worth telling? worth hearing? worth remembering? worth repeating?