Google Android Platform - The Android Log

Posted this morning on Tech Crunch:

Deep in the Googleplex there is an engineering team thinking about how to extend Google’s reach into your TV. Its work goes way beyond the Google TV ads currently being tested by EchoStar (and targeted with help from Nielsen). It even goes way beyond the development of a Google set-top box, which has been hinted at in the past. In fact, Google may very well want to do to the set-top box what it is trying to do to the mobile phone with its Android operating system—create an open-source hardware platform and attract developers to build applications on top of it. At least that is the unconfirmed rumor I’ve heard from two knowledgeable industry sources.

“That’s been a persistent rumor, yeah,” says Peter Barrett, chief technology officer for Microsoft TV (and the only source willing to be attributed by name). “You would have to ask them about whether they are doing anything like that and whether it is a good idea or not,” he adds. So I put the question to Vincent Dureau, the head of Google’s TV technology team and the former chief technology officer at OpenTV, who was hired by Google two years ago. “There are rumors about what Google does all the time,” he says. “We have been totally focused on advertising so far.” Google’s policy is not to comment on future products. But Dureau never denies the rumor outright. He couches his response with phrases like “so far” and “at this stage.” And, when pressed, he does allow that there is “a lot of potential” for turning the TV set-top box into a platform for applications, but insists, “I have no insights as to what form of applications will be deployed on those set-top boxes or not.” Perhaps. Or perhaps he just doesn’t have any insights he is willing to share with us. Fair enough.

Read the rest of the article, The Google Set-Top Box (Think Android For TV)

Technorati Tags: Google, Android, Television, Advertising, Android, TV, Set-Top

snl.com talked to MTV exec Greg Clayman about advertising and Google’s Android platform:

Clearly it is going to take a while, but you talked about the need for open networks. Why is this necessary? How would it reshape the industry?

That’s exactly right. The promise of this is that, right now, when you develop an application for mobile, whether you are us or EA Sports, you spend a hell of lot of time porting it across different carriers and platforms. You develop it for Brew, Java and maybe you want something for Windows Mobile. It takes a lot of time because every carrier is different and every handset is different.

It’s a hurdle. For a company like us, it’s not so bad because we have the distribution across every carrier, we have great relationships, we build applications. But it might hold back the deep development of a rich ecosystem [of content]. If you wanted to put up a Web site and video, you’d do it just like that.

So the promise of Google [Inc.] and something like Android is that it’s an operating system that will get widespread adoption. Hopefully, it is robust enough so application developers can access your camera, location and address book, all these things that are on the phone and are restricted.

Having said all this, none of this exists yet. Handset development takes a while. When they’re talking about the end of 2008 [for the first Android-powered handsets to launch], they’re talking about a year from now. And, in the best case, it’s a handful of handsets.

The other issue with Google is that this hasn’t been adopted by AT&T [Inc.] and Verizon [Wireless Inc.], that’s half the market.

The way we manage around that now is that we work very closely with the carriers; that’s how we will build our business.

Are there going to be offshoot effects of Android in terms of driving innovation with AT&T and Verizon Wireless?

They have 60 million-plus subscribers paying them lots of money every month and are perfectly happy with their phones.

I read Google had a $10 million contest for people who develop applications on Android. I don’t know the details of it, but that will spur innovation. It’s one thing you’ve got to love about a company with the kind of money that they’ve got and the fact you can do that.

To that point, I don’t know. [Wireless carriers] have spent billions of dollars building their networks and they manage traffic very closely and are incredibly particular about what data packets go where. They pride themselves of the quality of the network and they don’t share your location and personal data.

If you start getting into a world where everything is open and anybody can download any applications and there are viruses. The notion that I might want to make a phone call and I can’t because my phone has crashed because I downloaded some application: What is that?

Read more about SNL.com’s article, Q&A: MTV’s Greg Clayman: ‘Significant’ advertising on mobile networks a year or two away

Technorati Tags: MTV, Advertising, Mobile, Wireless, Google, Android