Google has released the source code for its Android mobile operating system as open source software. The move comes almost a month afer the first Android-based phone - the HTC G1 - was launched.
In a post on the Android developers blog yesterday, Jason Chen wrote: “We and our Open Handset Alliance partners have now released the source code for Android. There’s a huge amount of code and content there.”
The Android source code has been released under a number of “grants” which Google says are based on the licences used by the Apache Foundation.
Google says on the Android source code page that “Android is not a single piece of hardware; it’s a complete, end-to-end software platform that can be adapted to work on any number of hardware configurations. Everything is there, from the bootloader all the way up to the applications. And with an Android device already on the market, it has proven that it has what it takes to truly compete in the mobile arena.”
The source code and instructions for setting up a development machine for Android can be found on the http://source.android.com website.
Related stories:
[tectonic]
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This is pretty blind for Opera and the boys.
Google’s Chrome grabs 1% of market
Google’s Chrome Web browser is now out and although it isn’t yet available for Mac OSX or Linux, it seems it is already a hit with the online crowd.
ComputerWorld reports that the new browser grabbed a whole 1 percent market share in just the 24 hours after its launch. This is according to StatCounter and Ne Applications numbers announced yesterday.
Grabbing one percent market share also means that Chrome has passed rivals Opera and Netscape already. It is a long way off the roughly 20 percent market share held by Firefox and the almost unassailable Internet Explorer.
[tectonic]
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/
In a startling new take on data center engineering, Google has filed a patent for a “water-based data center” that uses the ocean to provide power and cooling. The patent also confirms Google’s development of a container-based data center, describing “crane-removable modules” to power the computing platforms.
The floating data centers would be located 3 to 7 miles from shore, in 50 to 70 meters of water. If perfected, this approach could be used to build 40 megawatt data centers that don’t require real estate or property taxes.
The patent application, which was filed in Feb. 2007, was noticed by TheODP, who posted details to Slashdot. That suggests that Google’s plans for floating data centers may predate a similar proposal from San Francisco startup International Data Security (IDS) to build data centers on cargo ships.
The Google design incoporates the Pelamis Wave Energy Converter units, which use the motion of ocean surface waves to create electricity and can be combined to form “wave farms.” The largest existing project uses seven Pelamis units to generate about 5 megawatts of power. Diagrams included with Google’s patent application indicate the company plans to combine 40 or more Pelamis units to produce 40 megawatts of power.
The patent documents describe a cooling system based on sea-powered pumps and seawater-to-freshwater heat exchangers.
Google previously was granted a patent for a portable data center inside a shipping container, which the company began developing in 2003, well before Sun Microsystems and other competitors began unveiling products based on the “data center in a box” concept. One of the inventors listed on the Google patent, William Whitted, later said the portable data center project had been discontinued.
Back in April we asked Google about the status of its container research. “We do a lot to make our infrastructure scalable and cost efficient, but at this time we have nothing to announce regarding this specific technology,” a company spokesperson said. But the patent filing describes the use of shipping containers in the sea-going data center:
The data centers may be employed with the computers inside standard shipping containers to make them more portable (e.g., capable of being hauled to the boat or by a truck). The data centers may be constructed modularly in areas having low costs, and may be transported to locations needing communications support relatively quickly. The data centers may be offloaded to areas where a more permanent presence is needed, and may also be connected to the motion-powered machines after such offloading, freeing the ship to deploy to another area. Also, data centers, when in the form of shipping containers, may be quickly traded out when technology changes. Modularization also makes maintenance simpler; hardware that is corroded or worn out from the harsh salt water environment can be easily replaced with fresh hardware by swapping containers
Google says the data center containers could be stacked two or more high, so that each data barge could hold “12 or more” containers.
The patent filing says the data centers would be located 3 to 7 miles offshore, which may signal that Google’s interest in undersea cables goes beyond connectivity between land-based data centers. While the floating data centers would include power and cooling, they would still require industrial strength connectivity. Earlier this year Google said it would partner with five other companies in building an undersea communications cable across the Pacific, which could provide high-speed connectivity to new Google data centers in Asia.
Google said it would use signaling mechanisms such as strobing lights, flags, and horns to alert other ships of the existence and location of its data centers.
The offshore location also raises interesting questions about jurisdiction, and which laws would govern the handling of any consumer data managed from the floating data centers. U.S. territorial waters typically extend 12 nautical miles, but other nations’ claims range from 3 miles (Singapore) to 200 miles .
The offshore location also differentiates Google’s plans from those announced by IDS, which plans to build up to 50 data centers on de-commissioned cargo ships moored at piers in major cities.
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Google at 10: Larry, Sergey & Me
It is not clear how old Google is - some argue that world’s largest search engine operator is 13 - after all it operated in stealth for about 3 years before launching in September 1998. Many major news organizations are going with September 2008 as the tenth anniversary so I am going to play along. Forbes.com even asked the question, Has Google Changed The World? from many well known people. For some odd reason they decided to seek my thoughts.
Gandhi changed the world. The steam engine changed the world. Heart transplants changed the world. The Internet changed the world. Google simply made a small (albeit important) contribution toward making Internet a better experience for all of us.
Google’s (s GOOG) contributions are still worthy of praise. It is no longer impossible to find relevant information on the fast-growing Internet. I remember tearing my hair out looking for relevant information. Today it is as simple as acting on our impulse to seek that knowledge–and that has infinitely changed the way we interact with the machines.
The article triggered a chain reaction and a trip down the memory lane. I had been a Google-addict for a while and loved its simple elegance over rivals such as AltaVista and Inktomi-powered searches. I had talked to the company earlier, but I didn’t meet the Stanford duo in person up until September 1999. The company had just raised about $25 million in venture money.
“I have never paid more money for so little a stake in a startup,” John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers was heard saying. Good thing he did - for he paid next to nothing for what could arguably be the Internet-equivalent of Alaskan oil and gas fields.
Larry Page & Sergey Brin had stopped by at the Forbes.com offices and we talked at length about the company. It ultimately resulted in this feature, How Google Is That? Larry still had the same disastrous haircut he supports today. Brin was measured and logical as always in his responses. They thankfully made no meaningless and “do-no-evil” hypocritical statements. They were just two guys out to change the world. I remember getting along with them famously, but never saw or talked to them since, though I have been to many Google press events.
Then & Now: You’ve come a long way baby
The company was 12-months old. They had just come up with their version of contextual-text advertisng system. They had 40 employees, were looking for an inhouse chef, and were doing about 4 million page views a day and about 4 million searches a day. That’s 45 searches per second. No one in the company owned a glider, though their venture backers had their own private planes. The company was housed in 165 University Avenue in Palo Alto and the co-founders were single.
In July 2008, Google registered 7.23 billion searches - about 242 million a day. That works out to about 4 million searches in an hour or over 1100 searches per second. (Funny, it turned out to be much bigger than the market estimates used by Google.) It had sales of $5.4 billion in the second quarter of 2008 alone. It now employs over 19,000 people. Larry and Sergey are billionaires and own a Boeing 767 & a Boeing 757. They are both married. The company has offices in multiple locations and data centers that are sprinkled around the globe.
After meeting with them and discussing the merits of search-only approach versus portals, I came to this conclusion: “Perhaps the other Stanford duo, Yahoo! cofounders David Filo and Jerry Yang, should be a little concerned–their media ambitions have superseded their customers’ desire for a really smart search engine.” In hindsight, I am surprised I was able to get away with making that statement and my editor didn’t catch what clearly was an opinion - a no-no in the non-blog mediascape. After all, it seemed so stupid to suggest that because Yahoo (s YHOO) had 240 million page views a day and was literally printing money.
Brin tried to convince me that the text-based contextual advertising (first popularized by LinkExchange, a company that was bought by Microsoft) was their way of making money. “Banners are not working and clickthrough rates are falling, I think highly focused ads are the answer,” Brin said, and pointed out that Google would be in black in 24 months. By 2001, I could have kicked myself for doubting the kid!
Why did they win?
Fast forward 9 years, and most of Google’s competitors have gone to the great technology graveyard, nary a tombstone. Simpli.com, Dogpile, Direct Hit and Northern Light were all part of the new search engines that were taking on the incumbents like Yahoo, Lycos and HotBot and wanted to make web searches simpler and more accurate.
“Google is essentially trying to categorize and catalog the web. We have a very different product and a different approach,” Jeffrey Stibel, cofounder and CEO of then Providence, R.I.-based Simpli.com told me for the Forbes.com story. He was taking a more exotic linguistic approach to search. It is now owned by Valueclick, an ad-network.
In comparison, Google’s analysis of the link structure of the World Wide Web and large-scale data mining and ability to ranks a page against similar pages turned out to be the right approach. Was it just the algorithm and a better monetization scheme? Was it a right solution at the right time? I think it was a bit of all that - but most importantly, it was a farsighted approach to infrastructure and the network.
It’s the infrastructure stupid.
This was the critical difference - I wrote about it recently - between winning and losing. I was reminded of this by an old PowerPoint presentation. They talked about using commodity compute infrastructure to out muscle everyone and doing analysis of the web like it has never been done before. It seems so obvious today - but back then it was an idea ahead of its time. The impact of pizza box servers was yet to be seen, and companies like Cobalt Networks (sold to Sun Microsystems for $1 billion) were selling early versions of Linux-powered thin servers, but they were not cheap by any means.
Many on Wall Street question why Google spends so much money on infrastructure. The question is why not - after all every millisecond of performance means more searches and more searches mean more advertising. More infrastructure means more crawling, more indexing and better results. I think that slide reminds us of the fact that infrastructure-as-an-advantage is in the DNA of Google. And that is unlikely to change - and that is why world’s smartest engineers and computer scientists still want to work there.
History has made a genius out of all who bet on Larry and Sergey - the investors, the employees, journalists who were enthralled by their story. In reality to those who built Google, it was the only option.
Tomorrow: What You, Me & Corporations Can Learn From Google
[gigaom]
Why is Google Releasing a Browser? Updated Analysis: Google, in a blog post on its web site has acknowledged the existence of Google Chrome, a browser that the company will be releasing tomorrow. Kara Swisher has confirmed the existence of Google Chrome, a browser developed by the Mountain View, Calif.-based search company. The rumors of the browser were reported earlier on Google Blogoscoped, which received a comic book that outlined the key features of the browser. The company released: So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web. All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends — all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build. On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff — the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.
Google says the browser is going to be in open source.
We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we’re committed to continuing on their path. We’ve used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox, among others — and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.
The new browser is going to be released in beta for Windows first, and there will be Mac and Linux versions at a later stage. A source tells me this initiative prompted Apple to release Safari For Windows as a beta last year. The question is: Why a browser? What does Google get from releasing a browser? There are going to be many theories around the Google Browser — that it is a direct challenge to Microsoft’s IE Browser, for example — but I think it might be more than just the desktop. Why? Because even today, despite strong competition from Mozilla’s Firefox, Microsoft controls about 75 percent of the desktop browser market. In other words, given Microsoft’s control of the desktop, it is hard to dislodge it on the desktop. However, it is vulnerable on mobiles, where IE Mobile has a non-existent market share. Like Mozilla, Microsoft is playing catch-up with Webkit, the core rendering engine for Nokia S60 phones, Apple’s iPhone Safari and Google Android devices. Even a Windows Mobile version is in the works. (Read my Webkit report.) By developing a browser that offers a seamless experience on both mobile and desktop devices, Google can carve out a nice chunk of the browser market for itself. The big opportunity could be especially the emerging class of mobile devices like the Netbooks. Most of the features mentioned in the comic book and Google’s blog post indicate that features such as faster JavaScript VM, better memory management, better Windows UI rendering, faster text layout and rendering and intelligent page navigation are all features that make absolute sense in a mobile browser. I wouldn’t be surprised that that many of these features end up back in the Android browser. In recent months, there have been rumors that Android is going to work on more than just mobile phones. Given the light-weight footprint of these devices and Google Chrome’s focus on “web applications” it would make perfect sense for Google to chase this opportunity. Mathew Ingram points out, “Google clearly sees the browser as a form of operating system — just as I think the Mozilla group.” I agree, and also I agree with John Furrier’s contention that browser-as-OS war is only beginning. What are your thoughts about this development?
[gigaom]
Google Calendar Gets Better a Little at a Time
If you're a GCal lover with the niggling complaint here and there, the Official Gmail Blog highlights several small but worthwhile improvements to the popular web-based calendar. Updates include better meeting request follow-ups and more flexible reminder schedules among a few other nice updates.
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Under the Sea, Google Expands Even More -
Google is working with a consortium of carriers to become part of an intra-Asian submarine cable system, tentatively called the Southeast Asian Japan Cable (SJC). The cable would be Google’s second play in the sub-sea category. The new cable links various different cities to Chikura, Japan Guam, the landing site of a transpacific cable called Unity.
Earlier this year, Google invested in this transpacific cable along with a bunch of other carriers. The Unity cable is expected to cost about $300 million. The new SJC cable has pretty much the same carrier partners as the ones in the Unity cable, reports Telegeography, a research company.
Companies that are participating in both consortia are Google, Bharti, SingTel, KDDI and Global Transit. Pacnet, which will control two fibre pairs on Unity, already operates the EAC-C2C intra-Asian mesh cable system and consequently is not involved with SJC. Globe Telecom of the Philippines and TOT of Thailand are also members of SJC and will be the landings parties for the cable in their respective countries.
Google’s fierce expansion under the sea is a sign that the company views Asia as its big growth market and is preparing to build an infrastructure that gives it a distinct advantage over others. Asia is one of the hottest Internet markets and the demand for bandwidth is exploding in that region. It isn’t much of a surprise that many cables are being built, leading to speculation that another optical bubble might be building.
[gigaom]
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This is unbelievable! "300 billion GBs per month served"...
http://techland.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/
By Yi-Wyn Yen
Google’s acquisition of ad server DoubleClick is supposed to help the search giant make a splash in the display advertising market. But it’s YouTube that Google is hoping will make it a big player on Madison Avenue.
“We’re spending a lot of time on YouTube right now because that happens to be a clear objective and clear opportunity,” said Tim Armstrong, Google’s president of advertising at a recent Bear Stearns media conference.
What isn’t clear is why Google (GOOG) hasn’t figured out how to make a profit from YouTube yet.
Google built its multi-billion empire by delivering text-based ads that appeal to marketers looking for a direct response. Now the search engine’s going after major brand advertisers who see video as an opportunity to connect with consumers on an emotional level.
For a company consumed by organizing the world’s information, Madison Avenue is an unfamiliar turf. “They’re starting to think about branding,” said Matt Sanchez, CEO of video ad network VideoEgg. “There’s a culture shift going on at Google.”
While display marketing isn’t Google’s forte, the company has created an appealing branding opportunity with YouTube. The videosharing site has become the go-to site for short, snacky clips. But some advertisers worry that, unlike watching an episode of Lost on ABC.com or a Saturday Night Live clip on Hulu, most of YouTube’s vast collection of campy, user-uploaded clips are unmarketable.
“This is a challenge for advertisers,” said Chris Allen, the video innovation director for media agency Starcom. Roughly 10 to 20% of YouTube’s content is professionally produced. That really starts to diminish the opportunities for brand advertisers.”
One media buyer takes a glass-half full approach. “We’re trying to figure out what is the value in brand association with content that’s not premium,” said Curt Hecht, chief digital officer for GM Planworks, which handles advertising for General Motors (GM). “The approach we take is, how can we package this in front of a ton of eyeballs.”
YouTube is the King Kong of online videos, and what it lacks in marketable clips it makes up for with its massive and engaged audience. In January, nearly 79 million viewers, or a third of all online viewers in the U.S., watched more than three billion user-posted videos on YouTube, according to comScore’s latest report.
However, delivering all those free video clips isn’t cheap. YouTube sends a staggering 1,000 gigabytes of data every second, or nearly 300 billion GBs each month. Several industry insiders estimate that YouTube spends roughly $1 million a day just to pay for the bandwidth to host the videos. By that number, YouTube downloads would account for roughly 3% of Google’s $11.5 billion operating costs for 2007.
YouTube, which makes the bulk of its revenue from selling display ads that run on the right-hand side of the site’s homepage, has not been a moneymaker for Google. The company states YouTube’s revenues last year were “not material” in a regulatory filing. The search giant paid $1.6 billion for the company in October 2006. “I’d be surprised if they broke $20 million in revenue in ’07,” said Anton Denissov, an online video analyst with the Yankee Group.
Part of the problem is that advertisers and companies like Google are still experimenting with what works in the web video market. Advertisers will spend $1.35 billion on online video advertising in the U.S. this year, according to eMarketer. That represents 1.5% of television advertising spending this year, and just 5% of all Internet advertising spending. The research firm forecasts that U.S. spending for web video ads will triple to $4.3 billion in 2011.
Wall Street is anxious for Google to turn the videosharing site into a cash cow. Last October during its earnings call with analysts, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said making money wasn’t a top priority. The company has focused heavily on refining a user’s experience and collecting data on how viewers find videos on YouTube. Dave Eun, who runs Google’s content businesses, said the company would “turn up the dial on monetization” next year.
Last fall Google introduced several types of ad formats with moderate success. Its says viewers are responding favorably to its overlay ads, which run on the bottom of a screen like a sports ticker 10 seconds after a video starts. A viewer can choose to close the ad or click on it to expand the ad before returning to the original clip. The overlay ads only appear on YouTube’s select premium content.
“We’ve been careful about testing different monetization approaches,” Eun said at the Bear Stearns conference on March 10. “We’ve purposely not taken the easy money. And frankly, there was a lot of easy money out there. We could have taken cut-down TV ads and pushed them down our users’ throats with pre-rolls.”
Not everyone is convinced that just because Google flips a switch, the YouTube money will start pouring in. “All of Silicon Valley has a hard time understanding that it’s not some spigot you turn on,” said VideoEgg’s Sanchez. “Maybe that’s how direct marketers work, but media buyers on the brand side don’t spend money that way.”
“There’s no silver bullet,” he added. “Google’s been testing and pushing and marketing its product, but it’s not suddenly going to do a billion dollars in revenue off YouTube.”
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Google Launches Lively In-Browser Virtual World [Google] -
The newest addition to Google Labs is a "3D virtual experience" called Lively, a Windows-only browser plug-in that lets you create and join customized virtual "rooms" in-browser to chat with your friends and associates. You can embed those rooms onto your web site as well. Not at all productivity-related, but a fun new way to interact online somewhere less boring than a text-based forum.