google

This article at UK site Marketing Week postulates that Dell may be working with Google to build the gphone.

Dell. And Google.

The evidence? Well, Dell did recently hire a Motorola executive! And, Dell has built PDAs. And some "senior industry sources" apparently mentioned something about it. "Senior" as in "been around a while", or as in "over-65"?

The last Google rumours we had emerging from the UK was that they were looking to buy Skype. That still hasn't happened, by the way.

The Android Developer's Blog has announced a number of "Android Code Days" taking place in major cities around the world. Munich Jan 29, London and Tel Aviv on Jan 31, Boston Feb 23.

What's a Code Day, you ask? Well, it's just our name for a day-long introduction and immersion session for Android. We'll give a technical introduction to the platform as well as a more in-depth look into topics of interest to the attendees. Then we'll have a free-for-all coding session that we like to call the "Laptop Lounge".

It's kinda like the .net CodeCamp I'll be at this coming weekend, except interesting.

The San Jose Mercury News has an article up highlighting more developer dissatisfaction with Android. This time a new cause for bitching, the as-yet-unrevealed nature of the source code, is the thrust of the compaints, although the good ole "buggy and lacks features" bit is brought out again as well.

As Google seeks to position itself to be the Microsoft of mobile by offering a free must-have operating system, it is running into Microsoft-style problems that could complicate the Mountain View company's efforts to expand into the mobile advertising market, which is expected to be $11 billion in just three years.

Even with the bugs and delays, I'm not sure just what's "Microsoft-style" about creating an open-source OS and giving it away.

This reads like manufactured news. Find a complaint that may or may not have some legitimacy, get a quote from somebody in the industry (usually an executive from a San Francisco start up; both SF start ups and their executives replicate like bacteria, so there's always one available and they'll usually say whatever you want), then package the whole thing up as news. The public's love affair with Google is slowly degenerating into reality ("He's realy nice and everything, but sometimes he'll wear the same pair of briefs for, like, four days in a row!"), so these not-is-all-right-inMountain-View stories are hot.

In other words: move along, there's nothing to see here.

Consider this quote, from a USA Today article that went up today:

Cole Brodman, T-Mobile's chief development officer, says Google's basic wireless goal is to use Android to better target ads to wireless customers so it can charge advertisers more.

By combining "unique information about consumers from the Web," he says, with "other information" from mobile devices, such as location, "Google believes search responses can be much more targeted for Google, and that the value they can bring back to advertisers can be quite a bit higher."

What is this quote telling us? That Google is a sneaky pubicly-traded bastard who woos us with the promise of a free, open, powerful mobile OS just so it can get its targeted-ad-enabling hooks into every aspect of our most personal electronic device. This is a dirty game they're playing: give us a free tool and monitor what we do with so as to make money off our good will. That Google's motives for creating and releasing Google are the same as they've been for every other tool they've created: offer us a valuable, powerful, and free service and through our use of that service compile data that it can use to generate ads that are more effectively targeted. Sounds like Google Search. Or Gmail. Or Google Reader.

History has shown that this is a win-win. Google has introduced services that have changed the landscape of the web and empowered users while turning them into a revenue-generating monolith of staggering proportions. And while there are valid privacy concerns engendered by this paradigm, Google has yet to either egregiously misuse the information it collects or allow a third, potentially malicious, party to do so (at least to my knowledge.)

Android is apparently not destined to be merely a pocketsized billboard, either. From elsewhere in the article:

Android won't favor Google over Yahoo and other search-engine rivals. [Brodman] says consumers also can "opt out" of Google's "cookies," used to track their movements on the Web.

The idea here is clear: put the technology first, offer a powerful product, and include the revenue generation as an opt-out component that is as unobtrusive as possible.

All right, I'm sounding like a fanboy. I'm no Sergey-lover, if that's what you're thinking. But I do think that Google (and Yahoo, and much of "Web 2.0") have developed a business model that someone with a distrust of overt capitalists and uberCorporations (like myself) can, tentatively, live with.

At first, I was thinking I would offer a review of Yahoo! Go 3.0. Ya know--load it up, try it out. Unfortunately, I've been informed that ver. 3.0 won't work on my phone, and the best I could do was 2.0, which is like hitting the dealership to pick up a new Porshe and only being able to afford the Yugo. And, btw, Yahoo's insistence that my phone is a T-Mobile Dash, rather than an HTC S621 as offered by Rogers Wireless, is just the sort of USA-centric assumption that really gets a Canadian's goat beaver.

So, then, I was going to riff on how everyone is casting Yahoo's announcement as some sort of direct shot at Google, an “Oh yeah?” response to Android, when really Yahoo Go was around before Android was ever announced and the new widget functionality is exactly in line with Yahoo's established practice of making the web more customizable for the user (Pipes, anyone?), but then I realized that I only had one extended sentence worth of content there and that it would be best drop it.

So here I am, left with no comment. Go check out Yahoo! Go 3.0. It looks cool.

In a move that convinces that certain OHA members are collaborating to create the fabled gPhone, Qualcomm has announced the RTR6570 tranceiver, which "...delivers support for the 700 MHz band to CDMA2000 and WCDMA (UMTS) devices"

Qualcomm, OHA member, creator of the MSM7200A chipset for which the first linux kernel released by than Android team is compiled, chip supplier to OHA cohort HTC whom rumour has oft associated with the gPhone, is building a chipset to run on the 700mhz band which Google has recently confirmed it is going after.

Whew. This is more evidence than your average 911 conspiracy theorist can produce.

Or maybe not. Maybe Qualcomm is just a company chasing profit who knows that whoever wins big in the 700mhz spectrum is gonna need a chipset.

Valleywag is rumourmongering that Marissa Mayer, Google's Vice President of Search Product and User Experience (how do I get a title like that?) may be showing off a handset running Android at an event in Palo Alto tonight.

If so, do we have any reason to expect anything mind blowing? We've all seen video of handsets running Android. The UI we've seen is not final and will be entirely redesigned. Hell, everyone who downloaded the SDK has an emulator running Android sitting on their PC. So why is this news? Why am I posting this?

Move along. Nothing to see here.

Here is the press release.

"We believe it's important to put our money where our principles are," said Eric Schmidt, Chairman and CEO, Google. "Consumers deserve more competition and innovation than they have in today's wireless world. No matter which bidder ultimately prevails, the real winners of this auction are American consumers who likely will see more choices than ever before in how they access the Internet."

The Canadian Federal Government has announced the rules of an upcoming spectrum auction, and 40 of the 105mhz on the block is set aside for new players.

To be eligible for the bandwidth reserved for newbs, prospective bidders must currently have less than a 10% market share of the wireless market by revenue.

No one knows if Google is at all interested in bidding, but given their announced intention to bid on the 700mhz spectrum in the US and their rumoured interest in an upcoming UK spectrum auction we feel justified in spreading rumours.

If Google were to enter the competition, they'd need a Canadian partner; auction rules stipulate that foreign firms may only bid in partenrship with a Canadian company.

If Google is looking for a partner, I'm Canadian and I'm available. I'll open the bidding at CDN $2.73.

Engadget has an interview up with AT&T Mobile CEO Ralph de la Vega, in which, of course, Android comes up.

De la Vega expresses some concern that Android will be truly open - he seems concerned that Android users would be able to search using Yahoo, for example, as though anyone would actually want to - which is ironic given mobile carriers' deserved reputation as being lovers of closed, monopolistic systems. He does indicate that AT&T is still open to joining the OHA and offering Android, however:

We are very open to giving customers choice. If you look at the way we operate, I think you will find that we give every choice possible to customers. We talked about the music, but if you want to get your e-mail from Xpressmail, from Yahoo, from Google, from AOL, from MSN, we say fine. We're in the business of helping customers being connected to their world -- whatever their world: music, business, entertainment. I think we need to give them choices. If this platform gives customers more choice, I don't think we'd be opposed to giving customers that choice.

Really, what we have here is more "analyzing the situation" kinda speak, which is pretty much what should be expected.

Incidentally, de la Vega's forehead vs. Sergey's hair is a matchup I'd pay to see.