But Rubin is not leaving Google, said CEO Larry Page in a blog post today. “Andy’s decided it’s time to hand over the reins and start a new chapter at Google. Andy, more moonshots please!”

In email sent to Android partners, Rubin pointed to Android’s success as a victory for openness, and said, “As for me, I am an entrepreneur at heart and now is the right time for me to start a new chapter within Google.”

Page explained the shift as part of the maturation of Android, saying Rubin had taken the project from an independent startup to being acquired by Google to now being the operating system for more than 750 million activated devices globally.

But the transition brings back the perennial question of Google’s two operating systems, Android and Chrome OS, which are coming ever closer to one another as Google has started making touchscreen laptops.

At the launch event for the Chromebook Pixel last month, Pichai’s take on that dynamic was: “We’re comfortable at Google with two viewpoints, and we are doing both.”

In addition to being the visionary behind shaking up the international mobile device market, Rubin had built Android as his own fiefdom within Google, with sculptures of the names of its operating systems out front and a fancy Japanese cafeteria inside. It will be interesting to see how it is now absorbed into the company’s broader structure.

Pichai, meanwhile, is a nine-year veteran of Google. In 2011, he turned down an opportunity to lead product at Twitter, which seems to have only accelerated his power within Google and under Page as CEO.

Spoiler alert! No one outside of a handful of Googlers really knows.

But we can make some educated guesses:

As previously reported, Google’s Android unit wants to launch a subscription service.

This one’s a no-brainer. Music is a key part of mobile, and Andy Rubin doesn’t want to cede that to outsiders like Spotify and Pandora. (Android’s effort to break into music via a download store and a scan-and-match locker have had little take-up.) And this one is relatively easy for music owners to sign off on, since they’ve already bought into the Spotify model — free ad-supported music that pushes users into a $10-a-month mobile offer.

As previously reported, Google’s YouTube unit wants to do … something with a subscription service.

At a minimum, YouTube is trying to collect the rights to sell music, in both audio and video form, via subscriptions. But it hasn’t told music owners what it actually wants to do with those rights, and it hasn’t shown outsiders a prototype of what it’s working on.

This one also has some logic to it, but it’s not quite as clear-cut. More on that shortly.

Before we get there, though: Regardless of what you’ve read about timelines (“imminent,” or “Q3,” or “2013,” or “sometime” are all options), none of this can happen if Google doesn’t get deals with the music owners.

Right now, as Billboard reports, Warner Music Group has signed on to both ideas. I hear that Universal Music Group, the world’s biggest music label, is interested, but is at least a month or so removed from inking a deal. But industry sources say that Sony Music is resistant to all of this. For now.

Even if Google gets all three of the big labels on board, it’s not home free. It needs buy-in not just from the people who own music, but from the ones who own the publishing rights — the underlying compositions for each song.

Sometimes those rights are owned by the big-three labels, but sometimes they’re not. And particularly outside the U.S., Google will need to make peace with the agencies that represent music owners. That could be tough, given that its relationship with some of them is frequently fractious.

So there are lots of ways this could get slowed down/crippled/derailed.

One encouraging sign that all of this could get done is the fact that Google is no longer insisting that music owners negotiate their deals with both an Android team and a YouTube team. Instead, YouTube content head Robert Kyncl is representing the search giant in all of its talks — though the deals are still going to get done separately.

Small beans? Sure. But at least it shows the Googlebots are beginning to grok the way the humanoids in the content business would like to work.

For argument’s sake, let’s say Google does get all of its deals done. What next?

The Android scenario is relatively easy to map out. Google has yet to show a competence for selling content, but its huge installed base will still make it a serious contender. And that will be an issue not just for Spotify, but Pandora and Apple and anyone else with a vested interest in digital music. At a minimum, it could make Android phones more attractive and/or harder to switch away from. And that may be enough to make Rubin happy.

The YouTube version is harder to nail down. As many people have pointed out, YouTube already functions as the world’s biggest digital music service. That’s in part because of the official music videos it serves up in conjunction with Vevo, the video company it is set to invest in.* But mostly because of all the music that its users upload to the service, with homemade visuals and without permission, which ends up staying there with the blessing of the music owners.

So why does it need to sell music? As Eliot Van Buskirk notes, all of that free music may be the reason YouTube is talking about subscriptions. Offering a paid version may make the music owners more likely to keep their free stuff up there, too.

Background: In olden days, music owners got paid a small fee every time someone played their stuff on YouTube. All those small fees added up, which was nice for the labels, but a real problem for YouTube, particularly when it didn’t have much of an ad business to absorb those costs.

Fast-forward to today: Now the music owners get a cut of the ads YouTube shows when it plays their songs. Much better for YouTube, but music owners grumble that they’re not making enough. And their deals are all up for renewal right now.

Subscriptions can solve problems for both sides. YouTube can tell music owners that it’s providing a funnel to encourage people to actually pay for music. And the music owners can let YouTube hang on to what may be its most valuable asset, which it can keep offering for free.

I don’t believe music subscriptions indicate a real change in Google’s plans for YouTube, though. As far as I can tell, Google fundamentally sees the site as a giant advertising platform, and I don’t think a new music product changes that. Just like the talks YouTube is holding with other content owners about other subscriptions.

I also don’t see how YouTube’s audience, which skews very young and probably hasn’t bought a thing from Google in their lives, is likely to pay for any of this stuff.

But if subscriptions — or even the idea of subscriptions — help convince YouTube’s partners to keep supplying their stuff to the site, then that’s probably good enough to keep everyone happy.

*As far as I can tell, none of the subscription talk affects Google’s plan to renew its Vevo deal and put money in the site. The reason the Vevo deal hasn’t been finalized, I’m told, is because its closing has always been contingent on Google wrapping up other deals with the labels, including subscription rights, as I reported earlier.

While much of our lineup remains intact from October’s hurricaned-out event, there are a few notable changes.

First, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt is joining the roster. Schmidt, of course, is fluent and well-versed on many topics, including competing platforms, the big picture of artificial intelligence, privacy, tech diplomacy and more.

Schmidt is replacing Android head Andy Rubin, who had an unmissable conflict halfway around the world. (Rubin will be appearing at our next conference, D11, instead, and Schmidt will likely have plenty to say about Android and Google’s many other mobile efforts.)

Schmidt has given us many a memorable interview, including a prescient declaration at our D9 conference in 2011 that the next stage for technology was a platform battle between a “gang of four” companies — Google, Apple, Amazon and Facebook.

Plus, it’s a particularly exciting time to have Schmidt onstage, as his book, “The New Digital Age,” written with Jared Cohen about the global impact of technology, is set for release on April 23.

With lots of interest around mapping these days, we’ve also added Waze CEO Noam Bardin, who leads the fast-growing and remarkably effective crowdsourced mapping and navigation startup.

Bardin’s Waze got a big boost this past year when Apple CEO Tim Cook went so far as to prominently recommend it as an alternative to Apple’s homegrown and half-baked iOS Maps app.

But the Waze story is bigger than that. This is a company that started from an open-source mapping project in Israel that is now vibrant with users’ driving data from all over the world. Is it a real business yet? No. But that hasn’t kept investors — including Kleiner Perkins, Horizon Ventures and Blue Run Ventures — from pouring money into one of the most useful examples of a social application.

Bardin, who was previously CEO of Intercast Networks and cofounder of Deltathree, doesn’t speak at events very often, so we’re looking forward to picking his brain on a range of topics.

And last but not least, another scheduling switcheroo: Twitter’s international head Katie Jacobs Stanton can’t make it this time around, so she will be replaced by the company’s VP of product, Michael Sippey.

Sippey has brought stability and a mobile focus to Twitter’s product team since joining last year. And he’s responsible for increased efforts at consistency and faster development cycles for Twitter’s apps.

Prior to Twitter, Sippey was at Say Media and Six Apart.

We’re keen to talk to Sippey about how Twitter thinks about mobile, especially monetization, for which Twitter claims it has a particular knack.

It will also be interesting to hear Sippey in juxtaposition with Facebook engineering head Mike Schroepfer, as the social media giant has more publicly struggled with shifting its product organization to think mobile.

In addition to these folks, we have a great array of speakers sharing mobile perspectives from around the world. Juliana Rotich will share her views from the mobile disaster coordination startup Ushahidi, while Movile CEO Fabricio Bloisi Rocha will talk about the quick-changing Brazilian market and Xiaomi President Bin Lin will update us on his startup’s latest high jinks in the Chinese device market.

Lady Gaga’s manager Troy Carter will talk about reaching fans in a mobile age, and DoSomething.org’s Nancy Lublin will talk about activating teens. Plus, Mozilla, Microsoft, Snapchat, WhatsApp and more.

“They don’t have to go in the store and feel it anymore,” Rubin said, during a roundtable with reporters at Mobile World Congress on Tuesday.

Plus, he said, the Google hardware effort is still in its infancy. “For Nexus, I don’t think the program is far enough along to think about the necessity of having these things in a retail store,” he said.

As for whether Google as a whole might nonetheless be considering retail stores, “Google has no plans and we have nothing to announce,” he said.

During the hourlong roundtable, Rubin also addressed other hot topics, including Samsung’s dominance in the Android market.

He and colleagues were coy on the company’s effort to move into subscription music, noting only that the Google Play marketplace is still in its early days.

“I’ve seen the same rumors you have,” said Google Play head Jamie Rosenberg. “I’m not going to comment.”

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“There’s one big company that’s being hugely successful,” Rubin said in a roundtable with reporters at Mobile World Congress on Tuesday. “That’s mostly about execution. It’s not mostly around Android.”

Rubin says that other Android makers are still making profits, if not large ones. And if they want to make more money, they will have to find their own path to take on Samsung.

“People have to figure out how to run their own businesses,” he said. “Should I be unfair to Samsung? I can’t do that. I have to be fair to everyone.”

Rubin also noted the huge investment Samsung has made in building its brand from upstart to global household name in recent years.

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Plus, it is open.

“In general, I feel friendly toward them. … open is good,” Andy Rubin said in a roundtable with reporters at Mobile World Congress on Tuesday. “Competition is good. We built Android because there was no open operating system.”

Rubin said he is glad to find himself in competition with more open operating systems than closed ones.

Getting more people with access to the Web benefits Google more broadly, he said.

“There are places where Android can’t go,” he said, referring to memory and other hardware requirements. Firefox can help reach those. “For certain markets, it makes sense.”

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We had assembled some of the biggest names in mobile technology and a stunning array of demos for what was sure to have been an amazing gathering before a sold-out audience.

Sandy had other plans, of course, wreaking devastation across the area, including massive flooding in lower Manhattan, where we had planned to hold the event.

As we said at the time, we would be back. And now we are pleased to announce that Dive Into Mobile has been rescheduled for April 15 and 16, still in New York at the same (now dry) venue in Battery Park.

A number of our original speakers have confirmed for the new event, including Android chief Andy Rubin, Facebook engineering head Mike Schroepfer, Verizon Wireless marketing chief Tami Erwin, Major League Baseball’s Bob Bowman and Fabricio Bloisi, head of Brazil’s Movile.

Several other speakers are making sure the new date works, and we look forward to announcing them in the coming days and weeks. We are also working on adding a few big-name speakers that couldn’t make the earlier date.

While first crack at attending the rescheduled event will go to those who were initially registered, check our registration page to get in line for tickets.

In the meantime, we made the most of our time stranded in Times Square, filming video interviews with a number of the guests who were to have taken the stage in October. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop traveled all the way from Finland, only to be stuck in New York, while Xiaomi chief Bin Lin was in from China.

Especially worth a watch are our talks with three of the international Global Voices who had made it to New York. Asia Kamukama traveled from Uganda to speak at our conference and experienced her first hurricane instead. Thankfully, we still got a chance to sit down with Asia and hear about her work setting up solar-powered computer labs in rural Africa.

We also got to meet two of the amazing high school seniors who are part of MEET, a program that teaches technology and business skills to Israeli and Palestinian youths. Program alums Amin Manna and Yuval Yogev have come up with their own mobile app aimed at promoting impromptu events via smartphone.

Also up on our site are stories on several of the products that were to have demoed either onstage or in the App Showcase at Dive Into Mobile.

• Desti
• Panacast
• Zappar
• Snapchat
• Grubhub

While those products have now launched, we have our eye out for other incredible demos to share onstage in April.

There have been storms before, of course. But few have gotten the kind of massive attention that tropical storm Sandy has gotten well before its expected arrival on Sunday across the Eastern seaboard.

Besides the high likelihood of the intense rain and winds downing power lines that will surely interrupt both cellphone service and Internet access, at least temporarily, the potential weather disaster is also felling a major tech event that was scheduled for Monday in New York: Google’s rollout of new Android products.

The search giant was expected to introduce its Nexus 10 tablet and possibly a new Nexus smartphone made by LG, as well as an updated version of the Android operating system.

But, at this moment, Android bigwig Andy Rubin will still be appearing at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference that is also taking place in Manhattan on Monday and Tuesday. Rubin is currently scheduled for Monday afternoon.

Coincidentally, Microsoft scheduled its Windows Phone 8 event in San Francisco on the same day, which is still on. Weather report for the Bay Area on Monday: 72 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny.

Also: Go Giants!

Mobile leaders from Google, Facebook, Nokia, Verizon Wireless, Pandora, Mozilla, WhatsApp, Telefonica and more are set to join us in conversation onstage on Oct. 29 and 30 in New York City.

We’ve lined up great new product demos, an interactive app showcase, and a series of short talks by end users from around the world whose lives have been significantly changed by mobile.

Ina Fried jetted to New York yesterday to greet the arrival of Microsoft’s Windows 8, and I’m joining her soon, along with Walt Mossberg, Kara Swisher and most of the ATD team. We’ll see many of you at the conference in person (we have just a handful of tickets left available here), and invite the rest to join us for a selection of livestreamed sessions.

As with all other D: All Things Digital conferences, Dive Into Mobile won’t be livestreamed in its entirety. But we did pick some winners for you to watch from afar.

Here’s the lineup:

• Monday, Oct. 29 at 5:20 pm ET: Andy Rubin, Google
• Tuesday, Oct. 30 at 8:35 am ET: Katie Jacobs Stanton, Twitter, and
  Cheryl Mills, U.S. State Department
• Tuesday, Oct. 30 at 9:35 am ET: Mike Schroepfer, Facebook
• Tuesday, October 30 at 10:45am ET: Bin Lin, Xiaomi

Note: All times are approximate and subject to change. Due to the nature of a live conference, there may be delays or changes in the schedule.

Some guidance on why we picked these particular talks, and why you won’t want to miss them:

Rubin will be heading to Dive Into Mobile directly from Google’s major Android product launch earlier that day.

Mills and Stanton will be having a rare public meeting-of-the-minds between a major social media player and government.

Facebook is all about mobile these days, especially now that the Wall Street folks have picked up on how important it is, and its engineering leader Schroepfer (a.k.a. “Shrep”) will address how the company is sprinting to keep pace.

And Lin is just days away from the release of the highly anticipated Xiaomi Phone 2, the direct-to-consumer top-of-the-line Android phone that is dramatically shaking up the Chinese market and has implications for the rest of the world.

“The playground is open,” reads the invitation to the event, which will take place at 10 am ET.

Android chief Andy Rubin is slated to speak later that day at our D: Dive Into Mobile conference.

The company has been reportedly prepping a number of Nexus devices, including tablets and phones from various Android device makers such as Sony, Samsung and LG.

(To see Rubin, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop and top executives from Facebook, Verizon Wireless, WhatsApp and more, be sure to register soon.)

This update comes from the Online Publishers Association, which has some fresh market data via a March survey. Most Internet users are still more attached to their laptops (67 percent) or TVs (62 percent) than to any other media-delivery device. But not all Internet users have smartphones. Among those who do, 68 percent say it’s a gadget they “cannot live without.”

The OPA represents lots of big Web publishers, and the real thrust of the research it’s showing off here is supposed to make big Web publishers feel okay about mobile.

The takeaway is supposed to be that people love their phones, they love getting information from their phones, and they’re happy to pay for some of that information. And they’re happy to look at ads. Phew!

You should be able to see more excerpts at the OPA’s site, but I just wanted to highlight a few other slides here. For instance, while I’m not surprised to see more than 90 percent of respondents choosing “access information” as their most common activity on their phone, I am surprised to see that the information is more likely … a weather report. Huh. No word on tomato soup ordering, though.

And while the OPA research repeats two bits of conventional app wisdom — most apps people download are free, and iPhone users are much more likely to pay for an app than Android users — I was surprised to see iPhone users claim that they’re much more into ads, period.

First off, Google gave the company only four months to build the product. Then there was the task of building a high-end tablet that could sell for just $200. Plus, he said, Google can be kind of demanding.

“Our engineers told me it is like torture,” Shih said in an interview on Wednesday, shortly after the Google-Asus joint project was announced. “They ask a lot.”

That said, Shih said his team has learned a ton from working so closely with Google’s engineers.

To pull off “Project A-Team,” as the tablet effort was known inside Asus, Shih sent people to work at various locations, including Silicon Valley. That put his workers closer to Google, and also allowed his engineering team to have a 24-hour development cycle. Even then, Shih said, he had to add another 20 people to the project. And then another 20.

Rubin gives Shih and the team at Asus immense credit.

“I don’t think there would have been any other partner that could move that fast.,” Rubin told AllThingsD. “We went from zero to working product in four months.”

But, having built the device, the big question now is will consumers bite?

Rubin admits that he was upset a year ago that Android tablets just weren’t selling. After looking into some of the reasons, Rubin learned that while hardware really matters on phones, consumers are buying into a content ecosystem with tablets. Or, in Google’s case, not buying into an ecosystem.

In particular, Rubin said that Google lacked some of the ecosystem pieces that were necessary, such as a full compliment of TV shows, movies for purchase, and magazines that people want to consume on a tablet.

“I think that was the missing piece,” Rubin said.

The amount of tablet-specific apps have also been an issue, but Rubin said Google is sticking with its strategy of encouraging developers to write a single app for both phones and tablets, while taking some care to make sure the layout and button size are optimized for larger-screen devices.

On the hardware side, Shih and Rubin feel they have something that can serve as a full-fledged tablet computer while competing on price with the Kindle Fire. Despite its bargain-basement price, Shih notes that the device packs a high-end laminated display, quad-core chip and other high-end features.

One way the companies managed that is through razor-thin margins. Google is selling the device through its Google Play store, essentially at cost, and also absorbing the marketing costs associated with the device.

“When it gets sold through the Play store, there’s no margin,” Rubin said. “It just basically gets (sold) through.”

However, it appears that the Nexus 7 is headed for retail shelves, as well, though only the plans for the Google Play store were announced on Wednesday.

While that kind of cost structure could make life challenging for any other hardware makers looking to sell Android tablets, Rubin insists there is plenty of room left for Android tablet innovation.

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That’s some impressive growth. Announcing similar metrics at last year’s I/O keynote, Google said it was activating less than half that: 400,000 Android devices a day. And just a few weeks ago, Google’s senior mobile VP Andy Rubin said Android was at about 900,000 activations each day.

“We’re activating about 12 new Android devices every second of every day,” Barra said. “Four hundred million is a pretty huge number, but we’re definitely not slowing down.”

In case you missed it, here’s a recap of what to expect. For starters, there’s going to be Google’s take on the tablet, though it remains to be seen just what the company is adding to the mix here. Google is also expected to unveil new cloud services, show off the next version of Android, and detail a home media player that it has been working on.

The company is likely to talk about Android’s broader future, but just a reminder that sometimes that bold vision proves trickier than expected, as was the case with some of the announcements made at I/O last year.

Check back around 9:30 am PT for live coverage and analysis from our team of reporters, including Mike Isaac, Liz Gannes and myself.

9:33 am: Wow, we’re finally in and seated. I’m not saying it was chaotic, but in the time that it took to get in, T-Mobile’s CEO resigned and the Google Play store prematurely showed off the Q streaming media player.

9:36 am: Google is doing a fun, almost-holographic visualization countdown of the last minute before the keynote.

9:37 am: Showtime. On stage is Senior VP Vic Gundotra.

6,000 people in attendance. And I think I bumped into nearly all of them on the way in.

“We still have some surprises left,” Gundotra said.

9:40 am: Android executive Hugo Barra is now up, starting with some momentum figures, naturally.

9:41 am: There are now 400 million Android devices activated, Barra said, up from 100 million as of a year ago. “We’re definitely not slowing down,” Barra said.

Daily activations are up to one million devices per day, up from 400,000 per day rate as of a year ago.

9:42 am: Barra now talking Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.

“We want things to be simple, beautiful and really smart.”

Project Butter is a part of Jelly Bean designed to improve performance. There’s also better search, and more.

9:43 am: Engineering Director Dave Burke is up to talk about this Project Butter, not to be confused with Qualcomm’s recent video of rival chips melting butter.

9:44 am: Talk is getting nerdy quick, as Burke is talking about triple buffering and other things. Upshot: The idea is to have smoother streaming video.

Meanwhile, on the touch side, Jelly Bean is designed to be more responsive by predicting where a finger is headed. The device’s processor is also ramped up when a finger is touching the screen to give maximum performance.

9:46 am: Really, shouldn’t it have been Project Buttered Popcorn?

Meanwhile, we’re getting a demo of two devices side by side to see the performance of Jelly Bean versus Ice Cream Sandwich.

“It just feels much more silkily smooth,” Burke said.

9:48 am: Barra is back with more Jelly Bean demos.

9:49 am: One of the new features is that Android widgets on the home screen resize themselves based on available space. Widgets and apps can also be gotten rid of more easily.

Jelly Bean adds a predictive keyboard that helps auto-complete and predict the next word. (Sorry, Swype and SwiftKey.)

9:50 am: When you don’t want to touch-type, there’s also voice-typing that works whether or not there is a network connection.

Seems to work in the demo.

9:51 am: Android adding support for new languages, including Persian, Hindi and Thai, with improved support for Arabic and Hebrew.

There are also improved accessibility features, including a feature for the blinds that allow voice output to be mixed with simple text gestures.

9:53 am: On to the camera. The camera app in Jelly Bean makes it easier to review the photos just taken, which can be accessed with a swipe.

A filmstrip view makes it easier to review multiple photos; ones you don’t want can be discarded with a flick.

9:54 am: Google is adding new features to its Android Beam sharing function, including the ability to share photos by tapping two NFC-connected Android devices together, as well as easy pairing with NFC-equipped Bluetooth devices.

9:55 am: Improvements to notifications allow one to return a missed call, see the subjects of incoming e-mail, or notify folks attending a calendared meeting that you will be late.

The enhanced notifications also work with third-party apps, as Barra shows with a music-playing app and the Pulse news-reading app.

9:58 am: Another key feature of Jelly Bean is improved search.

There are cards with answers for a lot of different queries, from facts to weather and more.

Voice search is improved in Jelly Bean, and speaks answers back, as well.

In a demo, Jelly Bean is able to answer the height of the Space Needle, define a robot, and correctly identify the Prime Minister of Japan.

Finally, a query to “show me pictures of pygmy marmosets” returns a bunch of photos of the adorable little primates.

10:01 am: There’s also a new search feature called “Google Now.”

It’s a mechanism for automatically getting information without searching. Google Now, for those that opt in, can predict what information might be needed by calendar, travel patterns, your location and search history.

If you are near a bus stop, you will get transit info. If you are walking down the street, you can automatically get information on nearby restaurants.

Google will tell you when to leave to get to your next appointment, based on traffic or bus schedules.

One can get up-to-date sports scores, based on teams you have searched for on Google.

“Google now knows when you are travelling,” Barra said. It offers up currency conversions, the time back home, and other information when roaming overseas.

10:04 am: Swiping up from the bottom of the screen brings up Google Now. There’s a search bar, and below that are the relevant cards pulled up by Google Now.

10:07 am: So when can you get your hands on Jelly Bean?

Motorola Xoom, Galaxy Nexus and Nexus S will get Jelly Bean starting in mid-July. The software development kit for developers is available today.

Google is also releasing a kit for hardware makers two months to three months before the release of Jelly Bean and all future Android releases.

The kit “allows hardware makers to innovate in parallel” with Google, Barra said.

10:09 am: Now up, engineering director Chris Yerga, to talk about Google Play.

10:10 am: There are 600,000 apps and games in the Google Play store, Yerga said.

More than 50 percent of apps revenue comes from in-app billing, Yerga said. This can expand even more with additional carrier billing options and the recently added in-app subscription option.

10:12 am: Users can now get “smart app updates,” where they only get the part of the apps that have changed. Typically, such updates are only a third as big as a full app update.

“We handle it automatically for you,” Yerga said. The feature works with Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and above.

Google is adding a free “cloud messaging” feature that developers can build into their apps.

On to the content side of Google Play.

“Today, we are bringing more content to Google Play,” Yerga said.

The company is adding movie sales, in addition to movie rentals, as well as TV-show sales.

Magazines are also coming to Google Play, including titles from Hearst, Conde Nast and Meredith.

10:16 am: Hugo back on to talk tablets. Hmm, I wonder what he has up his sleeve.

“It’s always been the goal of the Nexus program to provide you the ‘best of Google’ experience,” Barra said.

As expected, the company is showing off the Nexus 7, the tablet Google partnered with Asus to build. It’s running Jelly Bean.

10:18 am: Some specs: 1280 x 800 pixel display, Nvidia Tegra 3 chip, front-facing camera for video chat, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and NFC. Up to nine hours of video playback. Weight: 340 grams. (Why do U.S. companies keep giving us weight in grams?)

Yerga says Nexus 7 was designed to show off the content in the Google Play store, and to support the next generation of games and apps.

“Nexus 7 is made for Google Play,” Yerga said. The Nexus 7 is ideal for reading books, thanks to its weight and size, Yerga says.

10:22 am: For more on Google Now, here’s a story from Liz Gannes.

It’s also nifty for TV shows, Yerga insists.

10:24 am: Nexus 7 also has a new recommendation engine for finding new content, with a widget on the tablet’s home screen.

There’s a “what’s this song?” widget that identifies a song and takes you to Google Play market to get it. (Hi, Shazam!)

10:25 am: Nexus 7 is the first Android device that ships with Chrome as the standard browser. (Chrome has been in beta for Ice Cream Sandwich.)

10:26 am: On to mapping.

As Google talked about at a recent event, it is adding an offline maps option and other features.

Yerga is now talking about Google Currents — the company’s Flipboard competitor that serves up news from a variety of different sources.

Currents now has Google Translate built in, so articles can be shown in another language.

10:31 am: Gaming, too.

10:31 am: So, how do we get the Nexus 7? Barra is back. “It’s a fantastic device.”

Available for preorder today from the Google Play store, starting at $199 with a $25 Google Play credit, the “Transformers” movie, some free magazines, and a Bourne book.

Orders will ship in mid-July.

10:32 am: Next up, Danger co-founders Joe Britt and Matt Hershenson, to give an update on Project Tungsten — the Android-in-the-home effort the pair introduced last year.

This is where we will hear about the Q — the Google-developed, Android-powered media streaming device.

Yep. Video talking about it. It’s a sphere-shaped device. Mike Isaac has more on it in this piece.

“It’s a small, Android-powered computer that lives in your home,” Britt says of the Q. It can be controlled by phone or tablet, but the content comes from the cloud.

On to the design.

The Q is powered by Texas Instruments’ OMAP chip — the same processor in the Galaxy Nexus. It has Wi-Fi and Ethernet, Bluetooth and NFC, a micro-USB port for future accessories and “general hackability.”

10:39 am: Joe Britt giving a demo, including the device’s LED lights, as well as its ability to send visualizations to a connected TV.

“It’s a cloud-connected jukebox,” Britt said, noting that anyone at a party can add their music to the playlist.

Everybody that has a device can see the queue and add their music to the playlist — or even take over the system and skip to the front of the queue.

Nerd fight!

10:44 am: The Q can also be used to grab movies from Google Play in the cloud, including content on anyone’s device.

So, if you have an Android device and go to a friend’s house and they have a Q, you can stream your video to their TV.

10:45 am: Nexus Q sells for $299, also from Google Play store. Preorders now, and the device ships in mid-July, like the tablet.

10:46 am: Okay, I think that’s the end of the Android part of the keynote — looks like Google+ is next.

Gundotra is back, noting that Google+ launched a year ago tomorrow.

“We really think we are on to something special,” Gundotra says.

Gundotra says we should think of Google+ as a unification of all of Google’s efforts with a “social spine.”

Some stats. Gundotra said there are 250 million Google+ accounts, with 150 million monthly active users, half of whom sign in daily.

10:52 am: Google is adding a native tablet version of Google+.

10:54 am: Here’s a look at the new tablet app:

10:55 am: If you’ve got an iPad, we’ve got you covered, Gundotra said, noting that an iPad Google+ app is also coming soon, with similar features.

Available today for Android tablets, and “very soon” for the iPad. The company is also updating the Android phone app.

10:56 am: One more Google+ announcement, Gundotra said.

Events.

Online tools let you manage invites, but don’t do much once the party starts, or after it ends.

“Today’s online tools bail when you need them the most,” Gundotra said.

I’m pretty sure Evite and others have tried to keep people coming back for photos and more. That said, Google brings a lot of tools when it comes to sharing.

10:59 am: The invite piece has “cinemagraphic” animated themes — basically, pictures with animation. You can invite people by email, whether guests are Google+ users or not.

There’s integration with Google’s calendar and maps.

At the event, photos are key.

“Everyone’s photos get lost,” Gundotra said. They stay on everyone’s individual devices.

Google’s solution is “party mode,” which allows all the guests to share their photos.

“Party mode gives your party a visual pulse,” Gundotra said, noting that you can even have a live slideshow.

There’s an icon to remind you that party mode is on, but I foresee some embarrassing unintentional shares, nonetheless.

11:04 am: After the party, the Events app allows people to share photos and video. The app will put all the photos and videos in chronological order.

One of the guys on the Google+ team beta tested this at his own wedding, so now we are seeing his wedding pics.

“You can see the event from different perspectives,” Gundotra said.

Photos with most engagement (comment and +1) are made event highlights.

11:06 am: Sergey Brin makes a surprise appearance.

“It’s a little bit time-sensitive, so I apologize for interrupting,” Brin said.

“Who wants to see a demo of Glass?” Brin asked.

11:08 am: Brin says the folks with the Google Glass units are in an airship close by. Looks like the Airship Eureka I went in a couple weeks ago.

11:10 am: It looks like they are going to jump out of the blimp, err, airship. (Zeppelins are testy about the “B” word.)

And we see them jumping, live, through the glasses.

“It’s a little bit tricky landing on a building,as you might imagine,” Brin notes. Luckily, the Moscone West convention center has a pretty big roof, Brin said.

11:12 am: One has landed. Now two and three.

The skydivers are met by bikers, also wearing Google Glass specs, and do some stunts before handing off to someone rappelling down the side of the building.

“Don’t try this at home, kids,” Brin said.

“This is pretty wild,” Brin said. (Agreed.)

Now some more bikers are biking through the convention center and into the keynote hall, to strong applause.

11:15 am: And, the biker has made it onstage to join Brin.

The rest of the stunt team now making its way to the stage, to a nice ovation.

11:17 am: Brin gets the pair of glasses that the team delivered. “No, these are the wrong ones,” Brin jokes. “We have to do it again.”

Now, to learn more about Google Glass, is another Googler, also wearing prototypes of the high-tech eyewear.

So, what’s inside? Lots of memory, powerful processor, touchpad on the side, button for taking pictures, microphones, camera, speaker and sensors like accelerometer, compass and gyroscopes.

The project started about two-and-a-half years ago to get the technology into a small pair of wearable glasses.

11:20 am: Isabel, one of the designers of Glass, is on stage to talk about the software interface. The goal, she said, is to make it so you don’t miss the real world.

The display is above your field of view. “We want to empower people to use technology naturally,” she said.

11:21 am: If this is not ridiculously light, it doesn’t belong on your face, she says.

The latest prototype, she said, weighs less than many pairs of sunglasses.

11:22 am: She noted that people have started wearing the glasses while running.

We want Glass to work for many peopl, and in most situations. The company realized it needed to create a scalable design that is off to one side and can be paired with lots of different frames.

The other Google Glass demo-er, by the way, is Babak Parviz, who is back onstage.

Isabelle Olsson is the designer that was onstage.

Parviz notes that Glass is great for capturing those moments when you don’t have your camera with you, as well as for really capturing life as it is seen through your eyes.

“There is something really powerful about this,” Olsson said. Sometimes it is about really feeling you are there,” Olsson said. Other times, it is a way to learn new things or connect with a friend having an experience — like going to the dentist or being caught in the rain.

Parviz said the second main aspiration with Glass is to access information very quickly. Nowadays, you might ask a friend, or pull out your phone. “What we aspire to do is make that even much, much faster,” Parviz said.

11:30 am: “We would like it to be so fast that you feel you know it,” Parviz said. It’s a long-term goal to have information that close. “That day may not be today. That day may not be tomorrow.”

11:30 am: There are different things you might want to know at different times, like knowing how fast you are going while biking, or identifying an unknown food at a market.

“We are very excited about this possibility,” Parviz said.

Video shows how it is really handy, especially when capturing images of a new baby.

Sergey is back, noting that he is “so jazzed” that the landing actually worked, he says.

As for why it’s being shown at I/O, Brin says there are three reasons: One, it’s really compelling. Two, most people haven’t gotten to experience it; and three, the Google Glass team is still pretty small, and it wants to get developers involved.

“This developer community is going to be key to us.”

Google announces Glass Explorer Edition, available for preorder only for U.S.-based I/O attendees.

“It’s going to be rough around the edges,” Brin said. “You have to want to be on the bleeding edge. That’s what this is designed for.”

11:36 am: It will be $1,500, and we plan on shipping it to you early next year.

“This is really new technology, and we really want to get all of you to help shape it,” Brin said.

11:37 am: Now, Sergey gives it back to Vic Gundotra, who I think was talking about Google+ or something …

11:38 am: Undeterred, Gundotra is showing a video of events. Meanwhile, the crowd is all deciding whether they can afford to order a pair of $1,500 experimental glasses without breaking the bank or being killed by a significant other.

11:40 am: First Google+ event will be tonight’s After Hours event, which features musicians Paul Oakenfold and Train.

11:40 am: Hugo Barra is back on stage. Guessing it is giveaway time.

11:41 am: I/O attendees will get an Android developer pack. All 6,000 attendees will get a Galaxy Nexus phone, Nexus 7 tablet and the Nexus Q.

11:43 am: And with that, it’s a wrap.

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We’re headed to New York City for this gathering — our first one held in the Big Apple — with a lineup that is strongly focused on the globalization of mobile and its worldwide implications.

At the D10 conference, we announced Google mobile guru Andy Rubin, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop and Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs, but now there’s more:

First up, we have Mike “Schrep” Schroepfer, Facebook’s VP of engineering.

Facebook is unquestionably a mobile superpower — with more than 500 million mobile monthly active users as of April 2012. But mobile products and monetization of them are the company’s biggest weakness and potential source of competition.

No surprise — Facebook is currently in the process of transforming itself from a Web-first to a mobile-first mentality.

Schrep, who joined Facebook in 2008 from Mozilla, is a key steward of that shift, as Facebook builds its infrastructure, systems and engineering to be mobile-first.

With a couple of computer science degrees from Stanford, Schroepfer is on the board of Ancestry.com and is also a trustee of the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology.

We’ve also landed Jan Koum, the co-founder and CEO of blockbuster cross-platform messaging app WhatsApp.

As a free texting alternative, WhatsApp has insane global scale. It’s the No. 1 paid app in more than 50 countries on iOS. And it’s now one of the Top 10 apps of all time on Android, with more than 50 million installs.

As Ina Fried and I started planning Dive Into Mobile, we were cautious about committing to app makers early in the process, given that the market is so incredibly volatile. But it’s pretty clear that the story of WhatsApp will still be compelling in late October.

Just to give you a sense of the acceleration of this app: As of February 2012, WhatsApp said it was sending two billion messages per day — having doubled from one billion just three months before.

Koum, a Yahoo alum, has somehow managed to keep WhatsApp almost entirely off the press and speaker circuit radar — while fending off acquisition offers aplenty, from what we hear. He’s only ever spoken on stage about WhatsApp at Mobile World Congress, where WhatsApp took home the award for best overall app.

Schrep and Koum join an already strong lineup of timely speakers:

Android head Rubin returns to the D stage to talk about where things are headed. In addition to finding out what tasty dessert follows Jelly Bean, Rubin is likely to talk about the challenges of chasing Apple, bringing Android to ever-lower prices, and its latest efforts to crack the tablet market.

Nokia chief Elop is in the midst of a bold but difficult transition, as he aims to remake the Finnish phone maker. The company’s Windows Phone effort has taken off more slowly then hoped, while its existing Symbian phone business has tailed off faster than expected, adding financial pressure to the big strategic shift.

The result is that Nokia has had to cut jobs, close plants and make other moves designed to give the company the resources it needs. While some cutting was an inevitable part of the transition, the most recent efforts involved deeper moves, including the killing off of the company’s next-generation Meltemi operating system for low-end phones.

Mozilla leader Kovacs has grand ambitions of building a standalone operating system for the open Web. He’s working with Telefónica to release HTML5 devices, which should be a well-timed topic this fall when Dive Into Mobile kicks off.

There will be a lot more to come, of course, including some extraordinary demos, so we’ll update our speaker list as soon as we have more news.

As with all D events, tickets are selling fast.

Also to keep on your radar is our second annual D: Dive Into Media conference, next February in Laguna Niguel, which is being run by ATD media ninja Peter Kafka. The conference will delve into the extraordinary changes the media business is undergoing in every sector — from television and film to music and publishing.

According to a quarterly Android review presented in 2010 and uncovered by The Verge, Google expected to sell 10 million Android tablets in 2011 and capture a 33 percent share of the market. In 2012, it expected to sell another 10 million for a 22 percent share.

At the time, those might have seemed like reasonable estimates, but history has proven them to be a tad over-optimistic. Speaking at our AsiaD conference last October, Google’s Andy Rubin said there were a little more than six million Android tablets in the wild at that time. That being a cumulative number, it’s well short of the 10 million Android tablets sold per year Google had hoped for.

So in the end, Google failed to capture the 33 percent share of the tablet market to which it had aspired in 2011. And according to Gartner, it won’t quite hit that mark this year either, though it will surpass the 22 percent share first projected. In 2012, the research house expects Android tablets to account for 31.9 percent of the market – though that’s including Amazon’s Kindle Fire, which runs a forked version of the OS.

Andy Rubin, Google’s senior vice president of mobile, was shown during his testimony at a trial in San Francisco a series of emails he wrote about six years ago advising others at Google that the company should buy the right to use Sun Microsystems’ Java technology in Android.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The parties are the software giant Oracle and the Internet concern Google. At issue is Java, the software platform Oracle became owner of when it acquired Sun Microsystems in 2010. And the witness list will be interesting: Both Google CEO Larry Page and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison are expected to take the witness stand during the trial; as will former Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz and Andy Rubin, the Google senior vice president who runs its Android and mobile operations.

The allegations are fairly simple, but the case could have some significant impact if Oracle prevails in some of its arguments. Oracle sued Google in the summer of 2010, alleging that the Android mobile operating system violated seven different Java patents.

Five of those patents have since been tossed out since they were reexamined, leaving two. That reduces the potential amount of damages that Oracle might be entitled to, should it prevail. Google even went so far as to offer to cut Oracle in on Android and $2.8 million in damages, in the event that it prevails. Oracle declined.

The other issue, and the one that has the potential for more lasting impact, is over copyright. Oracle will argue in court that Google violated copyrights on Java. Specifically, Oracle alleges that when Google was creating Android, it copied a lot of material — more than 37 Java application programming interfaces (APIs), and 11 lines of Java source code — and that these are subject to copyright protection like other intellectual property.

This is a new and controversial legal argument that has software developers watching the trial closely. Google has argued that APIs shouldn’t be subject to copyright protection, because they’re more akin to tools and techniques that programmers use to build software. I may be simplifying it a little too much here, but one way of thinking might be to ask if it’s possible to copyright the technique and instructions for hammering a nail or fitting a door.

Google has argued that APIs and programming languages aren’t entitled to copyright protection, for exactly that reason: You can copyright a given program because it’s unique, but you can’t copyright the language it’s written in. Perhaps I’m straining my skills at analogy here, but the way I understand Google’s argument, as put forth in an April 12 brief, is that you can copyright “So What?” but you can’t copyright “jazz.”

As Google puts it in that brief, which is the first two of two legal filings I’ve embedded below:

“That is a classic attempt to improperly assert copyright over an idea rather than expression.” And earlier in the brief, it argues: “Without a computer programming language, the set of statements or instructions cannot be understood by the computer. As such, a computer language is inherently a utilitarian, nonprotectable means by which computers operate. … The protectable material is the computer program (the set of statements or instructions); the unprotectable material is the method or system (the language). So understood, original computer programs may be protected, but the medium for expression in which they are created is not.”

For its part, Oracle outlined its position on the issue in a trial brief filed on April 5, which is the second of the two documents embedded below. Here’s a meaty paragraph summing it up:

“Allowing copyright protection for computer interfaces makes sense because original expressions in software are innovations of an incremental sort that Congress meant to encourage. Trade secrecy law cannot achieve this goal because interfaces can be reverse-engineered. Patent law, because of its novelty and non-obviousness requirements and examination process, protects those substantial innovations, claimed as broadly and generically as possible, and in return gives strong protection against even those who independently develop the same technology. Copyright law protects innovations at a much finer level of detail (where original expression can be found) than patents ever could, but only offers protection against the copyist.”

Obviously, it’s going to be an interesting trial, provided the parties don’t find some way to settle before it’s all over. They tried settlement talks once. It didn’t work.

Google Brief

Oracle Brief

Noting that some 700,000 Android devices are activated every day — each one built around Oracle’s copyrighted Java APIs — the company figures “each day’s worth of activations likely generates approximately $10 million in annual mobile advertising revenue for Google.”

So $3.65 billion — which is over $1 billion more than the $2.5 billion Google claimed Android was generating in ad revenues last October.

Why the discrepancy? That’s tough to say, as Oracle doesn’t explain the calculation used to arrive at that figure or the numbers it plugged into it, aside from the 700,000 Android activations per day metric that was provided by Android boss Andy Rubin last December. Over at FOSS Patents, Florian Mueller speculates that Oracle’s number is based on the assumption of annual advertising revenues of $14 per Android user, though again no rationale for it is offered.

In any event, $3.65 billion is a far cry from the up to $6.1 billion in damages Oracle has claimed Google could owe it for the alleged violations, though that first sum doesn’t reflect Android’s full value. Said Oracle, “This revenue does not even include all the other value Android generates for Google, ranging from Android Market revenue, to other Android-related services, to ensuring that Google will not be locked out of the mobile business, to lucrative relationships with manufacturers of myriad devices on which Android can and does run, to the inordinately valuable access Android provides to customers for its new social network service, Google+.”

UPDATE: Looks like that $2.5 billion run rate I mentioned earlier is not exclusive to Android. Rather, it includes all mobile revenues. So the discrepancy between Oracle’s number and revenue generated by Android is even larger than originally though.

Online advertising network Chitika recently took a look at holiday ad impressions and noted an interesting reversal. In November, Apple’s iOS mobile operating system dominated its network, generating 51.7 percent of the ad traffic on it to Android’s 46.1 percent.

And in December, the two OSes traded places. Android ascended to the lead, claiming a 51.6 percent share of Chitika’s traffic, while iOS slipped to 46.5 percent.

That’s a noteworthy reversal, one likely driven by the bevy of Android handsets gifted over the holidays. As Android chief Andy Rubin claimed in a Dec. 28 tweet, some 3.7 million Android devices were activated over Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

But presumably there were quite a few iPhones given over the holidays, as well. So how is it that Android managed to unseat iOS?

Chitika chalks it up to Android’s openness, which enables a broad presence on a growing number of mobile devices made by a wide variety of manufacturers. That certainly makes sense. But there’s another factor to consider here, as well.

Chitika’s metrics are based on ad impressions. And Android offers significantly more free apps than does iOS. Many are ad-supported. In fact, according to Distimo roughly two-thirds of the apps in the Android Market are available for free. Could it be that Chitika is seeing more Android-related ad traffic on its network simply because Android has more ad-supported apps?