Live Blogging Google I/O: Day 2 Keynote: Android News & Google TV Announced

It’s Day 2 of Google I/O, Google’s annual developers conference. The morning keynote gets underway at 8:30AM Pacific. What to expect? How about Google TV? An Android Tablet? TechCrunch found evidence that’s what we may be hearing about. We’ll see shortly. My liveblogging begins, below.

Those at home can also watch live. I/O sessions are being broadcast here on YouTube. By the way, the keynote was originally scheduled for 9AM, but I was told it was moved up to 8:30AM. More room for surprises?

Vic Gundotra is talking about his first day at Google, meeting Andy Rubin — who heads Google’s mobile operating system efforts — talking to him about why Google needed to get behind an open mobile operating system. Because among other reasons, why if one man controlled one operating system for everyone, with a 1984 slide that goes up behind him to applause, which has to be a dig at Apple and how much it seems to have changed since its classic 1984 revolution ad.

Android update. 21 OEMs across lots of counties and oops, didn’t catch it all. Sorry, struggling getting up to speed as my computer crashed coming out of hibernation. Windows 7, I’m looking at you, baby. Android is first in total web and app usage, according to Admob. One of the top selling smartphone platforms. In other words, he’s saying it’s come a long way baby [and it really has].

Data shows 5X growth of Google search across all smartphone platforms.

50,000 applications in the Android marketplace.

Now demos, with Matt Waddell doing them while Vic talks. Android 2.2, Froyo, is out now. What’s in it? 5 pillars, starting with speed.

Now we’re getting Replica Island game being played live on the current “Eclair” operating systme (Android 2.1, I think) and Froyo — and it runs faster, smoother.

New enterprise features, including Microsoft Exchange friendly.

New services in the developer SDK. Developer talk to come. Good time to repeat what I said yesterday. I’m not a developer. So when they go all developery in stuff, sorry, I zone out. I don’t speak some of that lingo. I depend on the developers all around. If they ooh and ahh, then I figure must be good. So I’ll report on oohs and aahs. But keep in mind, sometimes they ooh and ahh about things like Google Wave last year that don’t really take off.

Right now, they’re oohing about cloud to device integration — how through a new API, you can program something that lets you send from your desktop to your mobile device.

“you’re going to love this,” Vic says, as he announces tethering and portable hotspot support. The carriers won’t, of course. Makes a joke about how using the Nexus One, you can provide support for a device that doesn’t have tethering. “How about that iPad,” he says, to laughs.

Now playing a game on Froyo in browser, the fatest mobile browser, Vic says. Goes up against an iPad, which is slow. “I really wonder if we’ll be able to get that in the app store? Oh, it’s a web app. How about that?” he says. The Apple slams continue. Vic is formerly from Microsoft, so he brings some Microsoft aggressiveness with him.

Working to let developers access camera from browser.

On to voice recognition. “pictures of barack obama with the french president at the g8 summit,” is said. And it works. “pictures of the golden gate bridge at sunset.” and it works to bring up a search. “how sucky is the ipad compared to android, we’re going to kick their ass with a tablet.” No, they didn’t say that. Just thought it.

“call 5th floor restaurant,” and it triggers the dial function. hint of “hey, we’re not worried if apple buys Siri (see Report: Apple Buys Mobile Search App Siri)

“can you help me find the nearest hospital,” he says now, to demo the translate option.

Flash support for Android announced.

“It turns out on the internet, people use Flash. And part of being open means being inclusive, rather than exclusive,” Vic says, after saying they want to have the most “comprehensive” browser.” Talks about daughter going to Nickelodeon and seeing “a sea of Orange.” “Daddy, can I play with your Android device.” “The full Nickelodeon, that’s openness” and thanks working with Adobe and “much nicer than just saying no”

Support to put apps on SD cards (finally) showing Need For Speed played on it. Funny bit as Matt keeps playing the game while Vic is saying “let’s move on.

Search finally added to the app store (to applause) and Vic says “Kind of embarrassed you have to clap for that.” Vic really works this audience well, especially because he just beams how much fun he’s having up there.

New bug and “entire stack trace” tool that the developers are going wild for.

Next for Android Market. If signed in, knows all your devices. Joke here, because Matt’s signed in and has a billiion Android devices.

Vic talking about getting apps to the device, suggesting that you have to download to your PC or Mac, then move it over to the device (which is totally not true for the iPhone). But he demos how you can browse on the desktop (which is often a more comfortable place to find things) and then send to the device from there, which yeah, is pretty awesome.

“And send to the device using the internet, over the air” Vic says to Matt, having him find a song on the web and send to the device that way. He’s been joking that this thing called the “internet” is an easy way to transfer stuff.

Now showing Android with two songs. How do you get all your non-DRM music there. Oops, mistake, and now we’re calling that restaurant that was demoed in voice recognition earlier. The call went through, and they’ve been on hold all this time.

Back to music. All home music is being sent to the device as a stream. Woah. Your music anywhere, assuming you keep your desktop connected and it all works, I suppose.

On to ads. “We’re not working with a handful of partners and charging them a million dollars to work with them,” Vic says, as he talks about Google and ads in apps, which is I think maybe another slam at Apple.

Stresses that Google knows ads. We have some tools you might have heard of. AdSense, DoubleClick, more — being extended to the mobile device.

AdSense for Mobile Apps — AFMA. Shows branded ads, expandable ad format.

Showing click-to-call, with ads that show within a geographic area.

Now showing ad from Medialess, a non-Google company, but using DoubleClick. “that’s what it means to be open, that we use the most relevant ad to the user. Sometimes from Google. Sometimes now.”

https://google.com/mobileads has more info. AFMA opens to everyone at the conference.

and everyone gets a sprint HTC Evo 4G device. the crowd goes wild. they really like getting free phones. “thank you for supporting android. thank you for ?being? on the side of openness and choice.”

Now intro to Google TV. Sorry, didn’t catch name of person who’s talking. Vic left, will add speakers name later.

Postscript: See related coverage on Google TV here at Techmeme and the official Google blog post here. Also see our post, FAQ: What We Know So Far About Google TV

People love television. Lots of stats. “TV just works. It’s easy, reliable.”

“We need to find a way to bring the entire web to the television.”

Freedom. Users want to go wherever you want.

Choice, many apps make you chose between TV and web. If you go one way, “they don’t know how to get back.”

Solution: take the best of both worlds and bring into a seamless world. Introduces Google TV. “TV meets Web. Web Meets TV.”

Now intro to Google TV. Sorry, didn’t catch name of person who’s talking. Vic left, will add speakers name later.

People love television. Lots of stats. “TV just works. It’s easy, reliable.”

“We need to find a way to bring the entire web to the television.”

Freedom. Users want to go wherever you want.

Choice, many apps make you chose between TV and web. If you go one way, “they don’t know how to get back.”

Solution: take the best of both worlds and bring into a seamless world. Introduces Google TV. “TV meets Web. Web Meets TV.”

Vincent Dureau will do demo, other guy keeps talking.

We have live TV now on screen, Google TV on the other. Can use existing remote, hit program guide like with regular TV.

First thing when turn on TV, you want to find something to watch. Brings up the guide, usual mess you see. What if want to find things easily. You can’t do it. What if we rethought navigation and made it like web. Steve Poizner attack ad now playing on the TV behind him. He jokes, “I can’t control what’s on TV.” Now we’re watching Sex And The City 2 clip…

And he can’t do more of the demo, because the keyboard has jammed. So it’s more Sex And The City for us. Oh, there’s Charlotte. I like Charlotte the best.

Now doing search for MSNBC. Getting results. Like I used to get on my Windows XP Media Center machine back in 2005. That was awesome. Glad Google’s rediscovering it.

If you have DVR, you can record directly from quick search box. Just like Windows XP Media Center did, as it was a DVR. That was a nice machine.

More demo problems. Says they’re using Bluetooth, so everyone is stealing their bandwidth, apparently. Which makes no sense. We’re using WiFi, not Bluetooth. Dammit Google if you can’t get more bandwidth for everyone here, in the hundreds, you’re going to revolutionize TV? At least my own Verizon card is working. Barely. Asks to switch boxes. The voice of God announces it has been switched. Demo guy says, “no, it is not switched.” We’re having some laughs. Even more at some of the things on TV that keep shwoing. There’s Octomom. “We though the Today Show would be pretty safe,” demo guy said earlier.

Did search for House, got special series of results, all content on TV and on the web. Combined. Now that’s slick. So you can find the entire episodes, whereever they might be avaialble. “It doesn’t matter where I get my content … they just want quick and easy access to it.”

Clicks to go to Amazon. Now watching House episode being streamed right to the TV. Can can click back to series page or go to live TV.

Netflix, Amazon embedded in Google TV, but can work with any partners. Showing suggestions for me feature. These are coming from Netflix, based on what viewed there before.

Now typing in URL, youtube.com, into the search box. YouTube loads up. “Now I have access to everything YouTube has to offer. It’s just as easy to go to any site on the web as it is to go to any channel on your television.

You can bookmark searches. Showing an Elmo search. You can filter the content based on personal interests. Sesame Street has built a custom Elmo playlist for him (or really, his son). Elmo is now singing the alphabet. “What’s amazing is that I just created my own episode of Sesame Street.”

Talking about how he missed the State Of The Union address. But with TV, stuck. None of the channels were then airing the actual speech. Now that’s changed. Typing in “2010 state of the union.”

[which is all really awesome. but hey, try this. want to watch the early season two episodes of True Blood. Go on, try. If you missed the replay on HBO, you’re screwed. HBO doesn’t offer it. DVDs aren’t out. It’s nowhere. That type of issue will still make the promise of Google TV awkward, though I do really like much of what I’m seeing.]

Now showing how while you can watch a sports game and then also bring up sports stats like from Yahoo, while the game goes picture in picture. Or get Twitter stream flowing. All of which Yahoo Widgets is supposed to do, does do already, but you have to have the right TV — and it sounds like Google TV is soon going to announce much more widespread support.

Photo viewing? The best one in your house is your TV. So this puts your pictures up there. How about games, Club Penguin up there (great, now my kids get more of my TV). “the web is unlimited. and now your TV is unlimted as well.”

Google TV brings most comprehensive, accessible and personalized experience out there.

Vincent talking now. Conenct existing cable box to Google TV with HDMI. It has WiFi in it. Has IR receiver built in. Special IP protocol between paid TV boxes and Google TV boxes. Plenty of processing power. Then Google TV input devices. All will have keyboard and pointing device.

Now showing how Android device can send voice recognition search over to the Google TV device. That’s cool. But to me, while hey, i’m ready to buy one of these, the keyboard is still and issue. It’s awkward to watch TV and reach for a keyboard to do this. I’ll be curious to see how small and easy it is.

Another demo, pushing URL of Conan O’Brien when he was at Google from his Android phone over to the TV.

IP remote protocol will be published so people can roll their own.

Three components. Built on Android 2.1 (and can be updated over time). Browser is Google Chrome. “We chose the fastest” he says of the browser. Has full Flash 10.1 plugin.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if I could take my mobile app and have it work on my TV? Soon, you will.”
Showing how you can load apps on the TV. Wow, that’s kind of scary to Apple. If people do start using TV apps, that might push them to wanting a phone that works all with it.

Britney Bohnet from Google TV comes out to do more demos. Downloading an app on desktop, sending it to Google TV. It’s the Twitter app.

Ambash? is now up talking more about developers and Google TV.

That was brief. Hunter Walk, director of YouTube, is now up, showing YouTube “Lean Back,” that plays a personalized video feed. Shows how he follows a friend, so when that friend uploads, it flows into his own viewing queue. Also default “channels” like comedy or sports. Pay per stream becomes “My Rentals.” Beta will be launched on YouTube web site in the next few weeks.

NBA guy up showing custom thing NBA has done for Google TV. Showing video playing, with a schedule nearby. A few other things not that really exciting.

Britney comes back to show more android applications. But first, Android puts up an error screen about the alarm clock. That’s closed, and she goes on and the Google Listen app. More pleas to turn off Bluetooth devices. Apparently they keyboard is Bluetooth, and it’s really having trouble. Makes more sense now.

You can discover new video podcasts, with all the HD video podcasts (sigh, I remember when podcasts were audio-only. No one seems to care about audio podcasts, anymore).

Anyway, you can subscribe to stuff and keep all podcast subscriptions synced across all your Android devices.

In quick search, can type in something like “tedtalks” and get more results, and then you can search within this Listen app — which makes me thing um, why do I need an app to find video podcasts. Shouldn’t that be native to Google TV’s search already?

Talk about engineer who takes closed caption feed on his TV to use with Google Translate to turn captions into whatever language he wanted, to help his wife who didn’t speak English.
Rishi is back, partners and timelines. Apologizes for Bluetooth issues. “You usually don’t have 4,000 people in your living room.”

Google TV platform will be open sourced into Android and Google Chrome areas.

How coming to market? In a big way. Three Google TV devices. 1st from Sony. Line of integrated TVs and Blueray players. Second from Logitech, companion box for existing setup. Chipset partner is intel. coming fall 2010. Partnered also with Dish Network. And partnered with Best Buy to get these to consumers.

In 2011, developers get more support, then in 2012, things go more open source. But but, you said fall 2010. I think a more closed system designed internally rolls out first from Google, then opens up.

And here’s Eric Schmidt.
20 years ago, I sat in the equivilant in this room he says, hearing people talk about integrating TV and phone. “We’ve been waiting a long, long time for today.”

It’s much harder to marry a 50 year old technology and a 10 year old technology than we thought. [think he said 10 years]

Paul Otellini of Intel. CEO of Sony is up. Jerry Quindlen of Logitech. Charlie Ergens of Dish Network. Bryan Dunn, CEO of Best Buy. Shantanue Narayen of Adobe. Eric’s going to ask them all questions.

Paul, why’s the processor so special? Version of Atom, full processing of Intel. And more and more that’s like a product pitch, sorry.

Shantanue: why’s Flash important. Why are we fighting for this? Seriously, we’re asking the Flash guy for this? No, Eric should be explaining why Google things Flash is important to support — and that was pretty much well said already earlier. Please tell me this end part just won’t be a love fest for partners who backed Google.

Howard, are people going to buy new televisions because of this (yeah, cause my Sony is like 1 1/2 years old, not really ready to toss it out). Paul talks about how much things are constantly evolving, how complicated it is to bring it all together, how much content is out there. “All of this is plausable on this feature. When we launch it in the fall.” Eric interrupts, “Did I just hear that, in the fall.” I mean, he’s not surprised at this news. We aren’t. They just said it 10 minutes earlier. But we’re taking a shot at more excitement, I guess.

How will Sony go forward. Sony does have phone on Android that’s doing well in Japan — Eric interrupts, most successful — Howard says, “when you beat Apple….we’re fairly giddy with this relationship, with a partnership with whom you have no fear”

Question to Logitech. Yes, they’re excited, want to do entire new peripherals around the TV. Eric: I want this now. What do I do with this box. I just plug it in? Logitech: companion box with controller that integrates a controller. We will shop that in the fall. Eric: which year? Logitech: This year. Eric: Just getting it on the record. Logitech: plug in with HDMI and you’re set. Me: we’ll see. and hey, how much, anyone?

Dish TV: We think it’ll grow our business. Know customer watch TV then go to computer. We know they want to combine these things in a seemless way.

Eric asks about TV analytics. What are things learned in running that. Dish: can get better product to customers, can give better recommendations. From advertiser point of view, they want to reach things.

[Hey, this is a good time to predict future worries about your TV viewing habits being recorded by Google TV, how does it get passed to partners and advertisers, what controls do you have over it and on and on].

To Best Buy: how important is the holiday / Christmas shopping season to you? Best BuyL: this is an entire new category of “smart TV.”

Eric says he feels you have to actually see it to get excited about it, so in store demos important. Best Buy agrees and silently thanks Google for sending people to their store.

Eric to everyone: We need you to take this platform and build to things we haven’t conceived of.

And that’s it.