Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: Android

Mobile App Developers Talk iPad and OS 4

IPad Been havin' a lot of fun with my iPad this this week, so much so that I almost forgot to post
this.  I started asking my local developer friends (some of them clients) what their thoughts were on the new device almost as
soon as I got mine last Saturday. So I’ve had this post brewing for several days
now.  Then, I’m finally about ready to post it, and Apple goes and
holds its “sneak-peek” media event Thursday.  So, natch, I had to ask
some of them for their reaction to that, too.

Here we go, then — five experienced Minnesota mobile app developers
tell me, straight up, what’s up with iPad as relates to them.  And,
after that,  I include some great insights from a couple of them about
iPhone OS 4 — coming this summer for the iPhone, and soon after for the
iPad. (Bring it on, Uncle Stevie!)

Joe Sriver, Founder, DoApp Inc. Joe, will your company be
developing iPad apps? DoApp-logo

“Yes, we do have plans for the iPad,
first for our real estate product, then our other products. No ‘made for
iPad’ apps are in the store from DoApp on day one, though.  But I did
preorder an iPad for the team.”  In a story our friend Julio
Ojeda-Zapata wrote in the PioneerPress on April 2, we learned that DoApp
was frantically at work on the iPad version of it’s “Home Kenex” app,
which is for home buyers and real estate agents.  Maps can be positioned
alongside lists or photos of homes to make navigation easier and more
intuitive than the cramped iPhone screen allows, said the story,
facilitating better house comparisons.  iPad becomes “a coffee
table-type of thing, with people in their agents’ offices cruising for
properties on the device,” said the story, quoting DoApp’s Wade
Beavers.  GPS capability will be added in an upcoming version of the
iPad, so home buyers or agents will be able to pull up listings in their
vicinity and “drive effortlessly towards them using satellite
navigation.”

Bill Heyman, Founder and Lead Developer, CodeMorphic.
Bill, what apps are you doing for iPad?  Redoing any of your
existing ones?

CodeMorphic-logo “No existing apps.  What we’re doing are new ones for various
clients.  Unfortunately, I’m not at liberty to say what they are.  I’m
also working on a new game app I’m publishing myself, but I’m not ready
to submit it yet. I’ll let you know when it’s getting close.” 

I assume you now have an iPad in your possession? “Yes, I
had one delivered to me while on vacation in Arizona this week.”

What are you finding in regard to how well your iPhone apps work
on iPad?
“They seem to work fine.
”

What about landscape mode?  Are you concerned that apps should
work either way on iPad?
“Apple has basically told developers that
they MUST support rotation in their iPad apps.  Unfortunately, it can
be a major PITA to support it well, but developers are going to have to
bite the bullet now.
”

Any other comment? “I think iBooks is the killer feature of
the iPad.  There’s been talk about the iPad developer gold
rush, but no discussion about the author and independent content
provider gold rush.  It’s going to happen — and I think it could be
every bit as exciting as some of the apps.”

Matt Bauer, Founder, PedalBrain.
Does the iPad fit in at all regarding your app? “Yes, it does —
from a coaching or team director standpoint, to track athletes.” PedalBrain-logo

I guess iPad isn’t too “mobile” as relates cycling, huh?
“It will be a new application than what we have.  Likely a different app
that we will charge for — probably like $20 or so.  I really see iPad
apps being sold for quite a bit more than for the iPhone.  It won’t be
till late summer we will think of doing an app.”

Your current app, of course, would work on the iPad, right?
“App, yes — but hardware, no.  Apple hasn’t given the okay for iPad
accessories from third parties yet.  Once they do, our hardware
accessory will work.”

Terry Anderson, Founder, Handcast Media Labs.
What’s up with you and iPad? “We also got our first iPad on
Saturday.  We’re within a few days of having our next release of the
SparkRadio app, which will HandcastMediaLabs-logo work on either iPhone or iPad.  In the
future, we will optimize a version for iPad that takes advantage of the
increased screen real estate in a cool way, but that’s further out
(maybe 45-60 days).  The visualizer screens on the iPad are stunning in
full screen mode.”

Did I hear you dropped your price
for SparkRadio on the iPhone from $5.99 to $1.99?
“The price drop
is temporary and is part of our experimenting with promotional tactics
and pricing to see the effect on demand.

“Ultimately, we’re likely to end up with this scenario:  A free
version called Spark Radio Lite that will be full featured, but will
only stream 200 selected stations (maybe two weeks away)
…  A full
version that will sell for between $5 and $6 (ultimately 30,000
stations) – so the price drop is temporary…  And note that both versions
will support iPhone and iPad equally –  the software will detect the
device and will load the appropriate interface… And we may come up with
an enhanced iPad version, which could be sold as a separate product, but
that’s down the road and still undecided.  Now that I see SparkRadio on
the iPad, I can imagine a scenario where the iPad is docked in a stereo
(many companies make them for iPhone and I assume we’ll see them
shortly for iPad), and Spark is streaming audio and providing a pretty
cool lightshow.  We think this will be a great way to expose the product
and the graphics to a larger audience.  Very excited.”

Bekki Freeman, Developer, TinyMission.
Please tell us about your firm’s experience, what kinds of apps you
do, and what types of clients you work with. TinyMission-logo

“Tiny Mission started as an iPhone
app development company.  Because of the high demand for applications,
and especially integration between web apps and mobile apps, we’ve
expanded to other mobile platforms, including iPad, and are eager to
integrate these with enterprise systems.  Two of our clients are On Impact
Productions
and Fraser
We work with both small and medium-sized companies, writing apps to
enable their corporate and customer visions.”

How many apps have you published, and in what categories, for
iPhone and other platforms?
“Tiny Mission has published one iPhone
application for On Impact Productions, and is preparing to submit a
second for them this month, in addition to a BlackBerry and Android
application.  We are submitting two iPhone applications for Fraser this
spring, and are part way through development on an enterprise
application that will be centered around the iPad.”

What are your plans for iPad apps, and what do you see as being
different or challenging compared to iPhone?
“We are very excited
for the iPad because of the endless possibilities for very feature-rich
applications.  The iPhone has been great for enterprise, but it is just
too small to do complex business tasks.  We plan to bring web apps,
smart phones, and the iPad together to fully integrate our clients’
business applications.  Our vision is for our clients to answer all of
their customers’ questions and needs without ever going to a desk.”

——-

So, enter the Apple sneak-peek media event on Thursday.
CEO Steve Jobs outlined what’s coming in the next version of the iPhone
operating system, called OS 4.  He highlighted seven new features:
IPhoneOS4 •    Multitasking
•    Folders to organize apps
•    A unified inbox
•    iBooks is coming to the iPhone
•    More features for the enterprise
•    A social network for gaming
•    Mobile advertising with iAds

I asked Bill Heyman of CodeMorphic, What’s your reaction to the
iPhone OS 4 sneak-peek announcement yesterday?
“Multitasking is a
great feature, of course, but still keeps the iPhone OS in control — to
prevent bad apps from monopolizing the feature. It’s probably not enough
for real-time, time-critical apps for the iPhone, but it’s a step in
the right direction. Apple’s drawn a line in the sand for how apps are
developed — Adobe Flash, Corona, and other platforms appear to be
screwed, as they’re currently architected.  Basically, Apple wants
native apps to use native code (Objective-C, C++, C, JavaScript).  So,
for these other development platforms to survive, they’re going to have
to ultimately be code generators for code types that Apple approves. I
suspect Apple is following up the release of the iPad with the new
iPhone OS to maintain momentum and to blunt criticisms of the iPad (and
iPhone) as new Android-based tablets and phones start to appear in the
next few months.”

I also asked Bekki of TinyMission, What are your impressions of
iPhone OS 4?
“Obviously, multitasking is huge.  We’ll be able to
offer our clients’ users so many more options for delivering
functionality, such as location-based notifications. Local notifications
will give many of our small business clients the ability to offer
reminders and user-specific content without having to manage external
servers and user databases.  We believe our clients will really benefit
from the new enterprise features.  The agility and flexibility of
wireless enterprise app distribution and the improved data encryption
are very exciting.  By breaking down barriers to enterprise deployment,
Apple is opening up a whole new market segment with opportunities for
companies like Tiny Mission to expand into.”

Finally, I wanted to ask Joe Sriver
of DoApp about the *other* announcement that came out at Apple’s media
event yesterday — that being their “iAd” platform — in light of DoApp
having its own such IAd-SteveJobs platform, called “Adagogo.”  Joe, what’s your
reaction to Apple’s “iAd” announcement?

“iAd sounds like a good product.  I haven’t delved too deeply into
it.  It’s another network that we will look at adding to our Mobile
Local News platform.   I guess I don’t see it as a big competitor to
Adagogo, since Adagogo is built into our products by default.   It will
become more of a competitor if we release an Adagogo API for developers
to add Adagogo ads into their apps.  Obviously, it’s a potentially big
threat for Google and Admob — or both together if that deal ever goes
through.  Google has the resources to compete, so I’m not going too
worried about them!”  Nice touch, Joe — spoken as a loyal former
employee of Google…

An iPhone Fanboy Reviews the Droid

Or should I say "tears it apart"?  No, seriously, my objective is to be fair here.  As an independent blogger, I take the opportunity from time to time to do a review. And I was offered a Droid loaner a few days ago by my PR buddy Al Maruggi, while we were at our Twin Cities Social Media Breakfast meeting.  I told him, sure, I'd take a look at the new phone from Motorola and Verizon he handed me in the box, then return it to him today. Droid_VS_iPhoneNote to the FTC: I'm not keeping it, dudes — it's a loaner!  Of course, I don't need it, anyway, since I'm now into my third year of unmitigated iPhone bliss, having upgraded to a new 3GS a couple months ago. Well, I should say bliss with Apple, not necessarily with AT&T.  The latter is, of course, the only carrier choice in the U.S. for the iPhone — unless you want to jail-break your phone and void the warranty.  People tell me they do that on T-Mobile and the phone works fine.  But for those locked into a Verizon contract, or those convinced they can't live without the better 3G network that Verizon claims it has (you know, the superior coverage they keep beating us over the head with in their ads?), then the Droid would seem to be the closest you're going to get to the iPhone experience on Verizon. 

The Experience

So, okay, let's start with that — at least the initial experience. (And no company, hands down, does that better than Apple.)  Which of the above phones would you rather have?  It all starts with the home screen, I guess. Now, granted — on the Droid, if you touch the arrow on the tab at the bottom and slide up, you get a much better looking screen on with all your little app icons — and without the mottled gray background (what's with that?) — but, overall, I have to say that the visual experience with the Droid doesn't compare well with the iPhone.  And I say that even knowing that the screen is supposed to be higher resolution than the iPhone (personally, I didn't notice that much).  I guess it's really the "brand experience" I'm talking about here.  And that applies to the box, the packaging, too.  Motorola (or is it Verizon?) tried to come up with something here as good as the iPhone, but to me they missed the mark. Something about the darkness of the whole thing — the black, the gray, and then that goofy little glowing red ball on the screen (on both the package and all over Verizon's promotional materials). Inside the package, though, the little "Getting Started" booklet is very nicely done — love the fanfold, and it tells you everything you need to know, quickly.

(NOTE: See the "Update" added at the bottom of this post.)

The Feel

The Droid feels good in my hand — solid, a little heavier than the iPhone. But that seems to be because it has more metal. And, heck, it does have a slide-open keyboard, so it should be heavier.  But that slight additional weight didn't bother me.  It's also a little thicker than the iPhone, as you would expect — but that's hardly even noticeable.  It's a teeny bit narrower as well.  To be quite honest with you, though, that actually feels a little more natural in my hand than the iPhone does.

A Look at How the Droid Is Billed

So, here's how Verizon presents the new Droid phone on its web site — including a big fat poke at the iPhone in a commercial they run at the front of this web page (hit "Skip Intro" if you've seen it). Funny how every new smart phone out there has to go after the leader. And Motorola, the manufacturer of the Droid with whom Verizon partnered, describes the phone thusly on its media center page for media and bloggers:

Introducing DROID by Motorola, a Smartphone powered by
Android 2.0 developed in partnership with Google and Verizon Wireless,
the nation’s largest 3G network. DROID delivers high-speed Web,
voice-activated search, a super large touch screen and thousands of
customizable apps and widgets from Android Market. With the
thinnest full QWERTY slider available on the market, it’s a
no-compromise supergenius in your pocket, multitasking at break-neck
pace to get things done.

High-Speed Mobile Browsing

• See the Web at break-neck speed on the largest high-resolution display with a Flash 10 ready HTML browser.

• Look up favorite sites, video and music fast with a high-speed, cortex A8 processor and lightning-fast connection.

•View it all on the 3.7” display with more than 400,000 total pixels, which is twice that of the leading competitor.

• Work faster on the Web with double tap to zoom in and out.

Google Searches Beyond the Web

• Type your search to deliver results such as contacts and music offering a complete search experience on a mobile device. 

• Use voice-activated search to serve up both your contacts and Google search results, based on your location. 

• Find your way with free spoken turn-by-turn directions with Google MapsTM Navigation (Beta), with Street View and LatitudeTM. View geographic information, such as My Maps, Wikipedia entries and transit lines, right on the map.

How It Worked for Me

I must say the Droid itself, and Verizon's service, worked pretty darn well, in the few hours I spent playing with the phone. The hardware is solid, and the service is fast — whether accessing the web, the "Android Market" to download apps, sending emails and texts… it all was quite speedy. I downloaded about four apps, one at a time, and they were all on my home screen fast. I've never used the Android Market before to get apps (this is the first time I've ever even used an Android phone), and I have to say I was pleasantly surprised to see how well it worked. (I hear about 10,000 apps are available there now, versus 85,000 for the iPhone on the App Store.) I downloaded a few apps from Minneapolis-based DoApp Inc. (which already has 75 in the Android Market) — I grabbed "MyLite," our local "WCCO-TV Mobile Local News," and a similar one for San Diego called "SD 6 News."  I also searched the Android Market for the app I use most — "Tweetie" — but no dice.  Also couldn't find "Twitterific," another one I've used.  But there were tons of Twitter apps in the Market, most of which I'd never heard of, or they were specialized apps for certain kinds of tweet content. The one general Twitter app that looked to be the most highly rated, in the five-star icons that appear with each app, was "Twidroid" — but I didn't take the time to try it (I know how Twitter apps work).

I also tried the camera yesterday, and found it works okay, though it took me a while to figure out how to best use the skinny little camera button on the side. And I really didn't notice the camera's auto-focus function. I did email photos successfully.  They must be big files, because it's a 5-megapixel camera.

Built-in apps like YouTube worked great. Again, quick access — and I searched on my name, and up came all my videos very quickly, in a nice interface, and even some I had favorited (all mixed together with my vids). The Maps app was awesome. Very impressive, and the GPS function was pretty darn accurate in instantly finding my location. There's a new "Layers" aspect to the Maps that I didn't really understand, but I clicked on "Traffic" and got a different view. Then I drilled in via the "Satellite" menu option and got a scary-good overhead view of my neighborhood — up close and personal.  Maybe that higher-res screen is what made the Maps look so darn good on the Droid.

The slide-open keyboard worked okay for me, but my fingers (which really aren't very big) were fat-fingering that thing bigtime. I honestly would have no idea how anyone could double-thumb that keyboard — except maybe someone with thumbs the size of a three-year old. I much preferred using the "virtual keyboard," which comes up automatically when doing searches, emailing, etc.  But the keys are much smaller for that in portrait mode than the iPhone's virtual keyboard — making it horribly hard to use!  So, flip it to landscape mode, and you get much bigger keys. That option worked way better for me.

So, What's My Net-Net?

Okay, those are some of good things. I try hard to be a positive guy!  But now how do I really feel?  🙂 Let me try to give my overall, bottom-line assessment…

Some things that really bugged me were the lack of the nice big, round home switch which I'm so used to at the bottom front of the iPhone. Man, I really missed that on the Droid!  Having to go to the top of the phone, and find that little tiny switch at the upper right was a real pain. I swear it takes two hands, or a real contortion of one hand, to press that damn thing!  That is a major user-experience mistake in my book.  I also found a lot of other things that just weren't intuitive about the phone's operation, or the navigation within apps, including email and texting. For example, I could not figure out how a text became a Draft when I was trying to send it, nor could I figure out how to retrieve that Draft so I could send it. Couldn't figure out how to delete some private messages I'd sent, either, before I turn in the phone. And, right now, I can't even get back to the home screen, no matter how many times I press the little home icon on the front of the phone.  Another weirdity: I have yet to see where I go for "Settings" — there's no icon I can see for that, as there is on my iPhone.  So I could not, for example, shut off the damn machine-language guy saying "Dro-o-o-id" in a low, bass drone every time an email came in. Puh-lease. Also, it just never really seemed natural to use this phone — which way to hold it… up or sideways, or slide it open… or what. And that home button way up top, then the camera button way down low. 

So, okay, my net-net … you knew this was coming: it ain't no iPhone.  Now, if you really can't leave Verizon, and you really want to pay the same price as an iPhone ($199 with a two-year contract), just to stay with Verizon — then, yes, it's a close experience.  But close is what you get, not the cigar.

Then again, if you really like Verizon all that much, why not just wait?  All us fanboys in the know predict Apple is sure to add Verizon as a carrier for the iPhone here in the U.S., just as soon as the AT&T exclusive expires. 

What do you think?  Lock yourself in for two more years with Verizon now, or wait for the iPhone?  What would you do?

UPDATE 11/6/09:
Wanted to cite an earlier, very comprehensive Droid review by Engadget, which appeared prior to mine.  (Amazing how being a paid blogger let’s you go to the lengths this guy did.)  Also wanted to give this local shout-out: Garrick Van Buren’s Droid review.  Finally, I point you to what I think is the best review of all — by the master himself, Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, on November 3rd: Motorola’s Droid Is Smart Success for Verizon Users. In addition, here are some more local tie-ins: a growing, grass-roots local organization called Mobile Twin Cities, and their Google Group.  They’re focused on all things mobile, including marketing, and all mobile OSes, including both Android and iPhone, of course.  And, on top of that, we even have a burgeoning Minnesota Android Developers Google Group as well.

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GlueCon 09: My Interviews with VCs Brad Feld and Seth Levine

While I was reporting from the first-year Glue Conference the past few days in Denver, I had the opportunity to interview two of the guys behind the scenes in launching and planning this great event: Brad Feld and Seth Levine, partners in VC firm Foundry Group, which is based in nearby Boulder, CO. (Actually, of the two, Seth was more involved in Glue, while Brad was the main guy behind launching a sister event called Defrag, which is held in the fall in Denver, the first one being in November 2007.) 

I had noticed in the days leading up to Glue that Foundry Group had announced a new investment (Gist, whose founder was at Glue), then I saw two more investments they announced on their blogs while the event was going on (Medialets and CloudEngines). So, I decided to see if I could interview both Brad and Seth during breaks on Day 2 of Glue to learn about these latest new portfolio companies of theirs.

Brad (left photo) and Seth typify what I’ve called before The New Face of Venture Investing — a post I actually did in December 2007, which specifically called out Brad. BradFeld   I’ve also written previously about Seth, in a post from June 2008 called The Best Advice I’ve Seen Lately on Using Startup Advisors. They are both really nice guys, wicked smart, and doing great work helping many entrepreneurs build successful startups in a place that…well, is not Silicon Valley.  Yes, they’ve proved in spades that it can be done. SethLevine And, unlike your typical VCs, they do believe in investing outside their own backyard — as is the case with all three of their latest investments.  Sure, many of their portfolio companies are in Colorado, where a lot of innovation is going on (which they’re involved in on a day-to-day basis — including the TechStars program, which they helped launch).  But they’re also smart enough to know great ideas and great teams can live anywhere. I love the way they get involved in these events of theirs — they’re right in the middle of it all, very much a part of the “community” that each of these events they’ve launched really has become. It doesn’t take long to realize that both these guys are “people persons” through and through.

I spoke with Brad first, about the Gist investment, which had been announced the week before, and in particular about the investment they had just announced early that morning, on Day 2 of Glue: CloudEngines.

Download the MP3 of my interview with Brad Feld.

Later the same morning, I spoke at greater length with Seth, primarily about Foundry Group leading a $4M Series A investment in Medialets, which had been announced on Day 1 of Glue.  We also spoke a bit about an earlier investment of Seth’s in the advertising space, AdMeld.

Download the MP3 of my interview with Seth Levine.

For more about the Glue Conference, see my Twitterstream for the past three days.  I must have tweeted darn-near a couple hundred times!  And I saw this morning after I was back in Minneapolis that conference organizer Eric Norlin said he’d just read through all the tweets on the event — 62 pages total!  You can find the whole shebang by going to search.twitter.com and entering “gluecon” in the search box. It was a very successful event by all accounts.  I’m really happy I was part of it, and have already said I’ll sign up for next year! 

Google’s Annual Letter

I just read Google’s latest annual report. Well, not the whole thing, but the best part — the letter from the cofounders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Actually, this year’s letter is written by Larry, since the two trade off. Googlelogo [I had the privilege of meeting Larry Page at a conference in March 2002, when the company had fewer than 200 employees. Still mad I didn’t slip him my resume.]
Wow, what a company!  But I guess you don’t need me to tell you that… 🙂  Every time I ever meet anyone from Google, it’s a good experience. And there aren’t many companies I can say that about. The 2007 annual report has been out for a few weeks, I guess, but I was just now able to take some time to dig into it. I think everyone should read the letter, not just shareholders.  So, here it is….

Excerpted from Google’s Annual Report 2007:

Letter from the Founders

Introduction
It is amazing to me that it has been nearly ten years since Sergey and I founded Google. When we went public, we promised to write a yearly founders’ letter in a frank style to keep all of you updated on our progress. We’ve taken turns writing the letter, and this year that responsibility falls to me.

We have seen our company scale tremendously, to more than 17,000 employees in 20 countries worldwide. But what’s even more amazing to me are the possibilities that appear before us—close enough to envision, but important enough to inspire our best efforts. I’m excited and hopeful we will continue to make progress in a wide variety of significant areas. I’m also happy to report that Sergey, Eric, and I continue to work together fabulously. I feel very lucky to be working with them and with our whole growing team (growing mostly just in numbers, despite our excellent food).

Speaking of our team, I wanted to give our deep thanks to George Reyes, our retiring chief financial officer. He has served Google extremely well. I also could not be more grateful to our users, customers, Googlers (our employees), and investors who help bring everything that is Google to life.
I will try to keep this letter relatively short, but I want to cover a lot of ground. I figure if you are interested in a particular area, you can just use Google to get more depth.

Still Searching
Search is a really hard problem. To do a perfect job, you would need to understand all the world’s information, and the precise meaning of every query. With all that understanding, you would then have to produce the perfect answer instantly. We are making significant progress, but remain a long way from perfection. We’re so serious about improving search that more than a third of our people are working on it. Another third work on advertising. We have dramatically improved our understanding of all the different languages, the meanings and synonyms of words, and the many different types of specialized information such as businesses and products. We continue our effort to extract more and more real meaning from the web in order to help people find the right answers. We recently improved universal search, integrating different types of relevant information, such as video, maps, news, books, images, and more, right into your search results.

Sometimes you don’t get a good answer to a search because the information simply isn’t available on the web. So we are working hard to encourage ecosystems that can generate more content from more authors and creators. For example, we recently announced an early version of a tool called "knol" to help people generate and organize more high-quality authored content.

Systems that facilitate high-quality content creation and editing are crucial for the Internet’s continued growth. Our AdSense program also helps the content ecosystem by letting any author or publisher instantly make money by inserting Google-brokered ads into their pages. This helps them pay people to write more great content in a virtuous and profitable cycle for everyone.

In all of these efforts, of course, the trust of our users is paramount. We simply will not bias our search results for financial reasons. Our ads are separated from the search results and clearly labeled. We believe strongly in maintaining the integrity of search.

I’m happy to report that we have a tremendous number of ideas to further improve search. Just about every week, we implement a new (and often clever) improvement to our basic search system. We will continue to work very hard in this area for a long time to come.

Advertising
Advertising is even harder than search. Not only do you have to find the right ad for every situation, but you have to handle paying customers! We have developed very sophisticated advertising systems designed to benefit both users and advertisers. For users, we strive to produce relevant advertising as good as the main content or search results. For advertisers, we provide tools to target and tune their advertising and accurately measure the results of their spending. Just as with search, we devise new clever improvements to our advertising system nearly every week. Fundamentally, every advertisement you see from Google results from a real-time auction conducted among advertisers. Imagine if we had a real auctioneer, how breathless and tired she would become!

Our advertising system works well, but we still have tremendous opportunities to improve it. For example, I just did a search for natural swimming pool, which returned eight righthandside ads, with only the last two of those somewhat relevant. This is both good and bad news. The good news is that we have enough breadth to have some relevant ads for an unusual topic. Furthermore, it is certainly possible to produce more relevant ads that would be valuable to both the user and the advertiser. Also, a user interested in natural pools is probably worth a considerable amount of money if there is enough competition among advertisers to bid up the auction price. The bad news is that we aren’t doing a good enough job yet for this natural pools query and many others. We also happened to have a number of local pool suppliers advertising in the San Francisco area for this query. Locally targeted advertising is another important area for us to grow both in revenue and relevance.

This general problem of ad targeting is very difficult and requires cooperation from huge numbers of advertisers. We continue to make significant progress on this challenging but exceptionally worthwhile problem. Sergey and I spend an action-packed hour nearly every week reviewing the noteworthy changes to the ads system.

70-20-10
We are still keeping to our long-standing plan of devoting 70% of our resources to search and advertising. We debate where we should classify our Apps (Gmail, Docs, etc.) products, but they currently fall into the 20% of resources we devote to related businesses. We use the remaining 10% of our resources on areas that are farther afield but have huge potential, such as Android. We strongly believe that allocating modest resources to new areas is crucial to continuing to innovate. This 10% of our resources generates a tremendous amount of interest and press, precisely because these projects are different and new. Often, we find small teams of only a few people suddenly command huge attention worldwide. That’s useful to keep in mind as you read about Google-the vast majority of our resources are working on our core businesses: search and advertising.

Of course, the needs of the 70% projects are different from the needs of the smaller 10% projects. While I would like to report we understand how to structure these perfectly, we are still actively evolving how we create, manage, and compensate these different kinds of projects. This is a crucial area of focus as we work to recruit and retain the best people, and keep them really happy, organized, and productive.

Acquisitions
Throughout our history, we have acquired more than 50 companies. Our goal is to be the best home for amazing companies that want to be acquired. We acquire companies in all different stages of development, but I will cover some of the larger deals here. We acquired YouTube a bit more than a year ago, and it has been growing like gangbusters. Eric worked with YouTube leaders Chad and Steve to establish a largely independent operating structure, with YouTube remaining in a separate office in San Bruno, about 25 miles from the main Googleplex. This is working well.

When we acquired Postini last year, we significantly enhanced our enterprise email capabilities and reinforced our commitment to serve the enterprise market. And by the time you read this, our acquisition of DoubleClick will have likely been cleared in Europe as well as the U.S. We are fortunate that DoubleClick’s headquarters is in the same building as our Manhattan Googleplex, which will make for easier communication between the combined teams, now totaling a few thousand people. I believe DoubleClick’s expertise in display advertising will be a tremendous addition to Google and will help open up new opportunities in this important market.

Apps
We have made tremendous strides in our web applications. I am writing this using Google Docs. I don’t have to worry that my computer hard drive might fail and lose my work, because it is automatically being saved into the Google network cloud. Sharing what I write is easy. My colleagues can write and edit the live copy without having to email endless revisions (my writing needs a lot of revising!). You can also create spreadsheets and presentations in Docs. Every week, I approve a Google spreadsheet with a summary of every single hire we are making worldwide. With Google Apps, you can collaborate and share all types of documents and calendars with other people in your organization in seconds.

Gmail continues to enjoy tremendous growth, and now has a brand new implementation that’s faster and makes it easier for us to add new features. Instant messaging within Gmail- which works right inside your browser with no installation-has been a big hit. We’re also planning to roll out a plethora of new features. We are working hard to combine our many Apps offerings into a more coherent set of products that "just work." I use Google Apps every day for all of my work.

Our products are improving quickly and have incredibly powerful sharing and chat functionality that wasn’t possible before the web.

We’ve started the next phase in productivity software. That phase is about working with everyone seamlessly and effortlessly. Our goal is fast, easy access to create or share from any computer in the world. No futzing with software required. Just open your browser.

Mobile
Android is our newly announced mobile phone platform. We’ve gathered more than 30 companies together into Android’s Open Handset Alliance. The goals of Android are ambitious: We aim to make your phone work better than your computer. Android is very open, so you can run any software, just like a computer. Today, Android is released as a software toolkit for developers based on Linux, Java, and high-end web browser technologies. We and our partners are very much looking forward to having Android ship in real devices. We are excited about realizing the potential of that little computer in your pocket (your cool, web-centric Android phone).

In addition to Android, we endeavor to make all of our products work well with existing phones and have been quite successful with much greater usage in a wide variety of areas. We have been working to try to apply some of the open-access principles of the Internet to increase user choice and innovation in the mobile space. We also have been active with a 10% project focused on wireless spectrum, which has created a great deal of interest. We were successful in helping convince the US Federal Communications Commission to attach most of our desired openness principles to the ongoing 700 Mhz auction.

The World
It turns out the real world matters to people, in the form of maps, satellite images, business locations, bike paths, and all other types of geographic data. We are hard at work in all these domains. We even launched photographs of nearly everything at street level in 30 metro areas, integrated right into Google Maps (click the Street View button). Google Earth literally goes out of this world with a new Sky mode (just click on the Sky icon). You can see an amazing view of the night sky, complete with super-high resolution images from the Hubble telescope that you can zoom right into.

Speaking of the world, we don’t want it to end-especially by environmental catastrophe. Consequently, we are working hard on our own considerable energy use in data centers by making them far more efficient. We’re working directly on our own carbon/methane off sets to cover our usage. But we are all on the same Spaceship Earth, and we need to energetically address harmful emissions. To this end, we launched RE<C, an initiative to make renewable energy cheaper than coal-fired plants. We have started our own internal development effort, and have made investments in promising technologies. We are working on new clean technologies that could make more energy than we have now, and do it at a lower cost. Our goal is to generate a gigawatt (roughly enough to power San Francisco) of clean, cheap energy in years, not decades. If we are successful, we will not only help the world, but also make substantial profits.

We continue our efforts to make Google more global. Google is available in 160 different local country domains and 117 languages (including some obscure ones like "Swedish Chef" – Bork, Bork, Bork). While Google is available virtually everywhere there is Internet access, our business operations are in just 20 countries. We are still working to establish a significant business presence in places such as the Middle East. As we expand our operations and hire our first employees in another country, that part of Google feels like a startup.

We started Google.org with the idea of eclipsing the impact of Google itself while focusing on more philanthropic causes. Though we are working on extremely tough problems in difficult locations, we have made significant strides. We have established several main focus areas, including predicting and preventing disease; improving public services by informing and empowering people; and increasing economic growth and job creation through stimulating small- and medium-sized enterprises.

Conclusion
By organizing the world’s information and making it universally accessible and useful, we’re helping people worldwide make better decisions and improve their lives. I feel lucky — I am lucky — to be involved in this important ecosystem of better information. While almost all of our effort is focused on important improvements to core search and advertising, the small percentage left over is producing a lot of important innovation and even more notice from the world. I could not be more excited about all the possibilities for Googlers to produce amazing computer experiences that their mothers and fathers — and hundreds of millions of other people — will use every day.

Larry Page
Co-Founder; President, Products

Sergey Brin

Co-Founder; President, Technology

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What do you think about this year’s letter?  What stands out for you?  Anything else you wished they would have addressed?  (Note: I also blogged today about the Google-led initiative called "OpenSocial," over on my other blog, at NewMediaWise.com.)