Google is a hyper-competitive company, and they repeatedly enter markets that already exist and crush competitors. Nothing wrong with that. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work, and Google’s successes are admirable. But there’s nothing stupid about seeing Google being pitted “versus” other companies. They want everything; their ambition is boundless.

– John Gruber, in Larry Page’s remarks onstage at Google I/O about competition — that talk about Google “versus some other company” is stupid or not interesting

You gotta hand it to Microsoft: Yesterday they got Google to help promote their message for them.

On Wednesday afternoon, shortly after Google finished a marathon presentation at its I/O developer conference, reports surfaced that Google’s YouTube had sent Microsoft a cease-and-desist letter demanding that Redmond shut down a YouTube app it had built for its Windows Phone.

The issue, in a nutshell, is that the Microsoft app, built on YouTube’s public data feed, violates the video site’s terms of service, primarily because it strips out YouTube’s ads. Windows Phone users can still watch YouTube videos via their Web browser, but the experience isn’t as slick as a dedicated app.

So: Bad for Windows Phone users! But while it’s tempting to turn this into a he said/he said, there’s little to hash out, fact-wise.

There’s no dispute that Microsoft’s Windows app violates Google’s terms. And Microsoft, which has been complaining about access to YouTube for years, had to know exactly what it was doing. It also knows how to play nicely with YouTube, as it did with an Xbox app the two companies built together and launched last year.

The only question is why Microsoft went ahead and built the app anyway. Here we have to do some guessing, as both YouTube and Microsoft executives declined to comment.

So, okay, I’ll guess: Microsoft launched the YouTube app last week precisely because it hoped YouTube would make a fuss.

I’m also guessing that Microsoft is very happy that The Verge and Wired were able to “obtain” copies of the C&D letter.

I’ll keep guessing: I think Microsoft is ecstatic about the fact that Google sent the letter yesterday, on the same day it wanted all eyes on its new products and services.

And the fact that Larry Page closed the Google event by insisting that he’s got nothing but love for everyone, everywhere — even if they’re building rival technologies?

My guess is they have to be over the moon about that.

After writing a post on Tuesday about being diagnosed with a rare voice condition which has barred him from making many public appearances over the past two years, Google CEO and co-founder Larry Page made a surprise appearance at Google’s I/O developer conference on Wednesday.

The CEO, who has not appeared at the I/O conference in years, took about 10 minutes to deliver a sort of evangelist-like mission statement, thoughts on how he sees Google’s role in the world at large, and how the different parts of his organization — Android, Google X, Maps, Search — help people.

“Technology should do the hard work,” Page said, “so that people can get on with doing the things that make them happiest in life.”

Page’s appearance is noteworthy in that, unlike other technology CEOs — Zuckerberg, Cook, Bezos — Page has not often stepped into the limelight for new product introductions or company updates, aside from his appearances on the company’s earnings calls.

But unlike his quarterly appearances filled with balance-sheet numbers and chats with Wall Street analysts, Page’s talk today aimed to appeal to a more emotional part of his audience, even evoking a memory of a time he went to a technology conference with his father, when Page was a child.

At other moments, Page seemed to wax philosophical. “If I think back to a long time ago, all of humanity was basically farming or hunting all the time,” he said. “If you lived in that time, you probably hoped that you could feed your family. For us, we don’t worry about that … and the reason for that is technology.”

Indeed, a lot of the speech had a very “Kumbaya” feeling to it, with Page calling for an end to the animosity that inhabits much of the tech industry.

“Every story I read about Google is ‘us vs some other company’ or some stupid thing, and I just don’t find that very interesting,” Page said. “We should be building great things that don’t exist. Being negative isn’t how we make progress.”

Yet in the very same address, Page took some potshots at competitors like Microsoft and Oracle, both of which are involved in litigation over certain Google products.

When asked during a Q&A session about the fate of Android in light of Oracle’s court victories, Page seemed eager to snipe: “Money is more important to them than cooperation,” Page said.

Speaking of a lack of cooperation, just today The Verge surfaced a cease-and-desist letter from Google to Microsoft, demanding that Microsoft remove the YouTube app from its Windows Phone devices, citing a lack of in-app advertising. Funny timing.

Page is hardly the only Google executive — much less Google employee — to shoot down competitors. Google Maps VP Brian McClendon was eager to make a subtle dig at Apple’s less-than-lauded mapping product. And Google+ SVP and long-time I/O emcee Vic Gundotra has thrown quite a few competitive elbows at other tech companies in his time.

Regardless, the Street seemed to eat it up. Shares of Google reached an all-time high on Wednesday afternoon, hitting $916.38 per share, before edging back slightly to close at $915.89.

RELATED POSTS:

• Shoot the Moon: How Google Turned a Hodgepodge of Upgrades Into a Show of Strength
• Google I/O: Music, Maps, Messaging and More
• Larry Page Takes the Pulpit to Praise Technology, Snipe at Competitors
• Next Google Maps Update to Include Better Venue Search, Waze-Like Rerouting
• Google Gives Search a Deeper Voice and Adds Reminders and More to Google Now
• With Revamped Hangouts, Google Aims to Unify Messaging
• Google+ Gets a Bit More Pinteresting
• Google Chrome: 750 Million Active Users, Synchronized Web and Mobile Browsing
• Coming Soon From Google: A $649 Samsung Galaxy S4 Running Stock Android
• With Sights Set on Spotify (And Pandora), Google Launches a Music Subscription Service
• Google on Android: 900 Million Activations, New Tools for Developers Coming
• Google Doubles Down on Music Subscriptions, Which Means Google Isn’t Serious About Music Subscriptions
• Where Are They Now? Google I/O 2012 Edition.
• At I/O, Google Tilts Toward Android Services Over Android OS
• Google Downplays Expectations Ahead of I/O Developer Conference
• Will Google Deliver on Its Nexus Q Promise? Not at This Year’s I/O.
• Ahead of I/O, Google Wallet Drops Plans to Introduce a Physical Card
• Google Goes With Unified I/O Keynote (But Will It Unify Its Products?)

The maker of Android and Chrome is just about to kick off a three-hour keynote, and if you want to see it for yourself, you can: Here’s the livestream. Meanwhile, we’ll be doing live coverage, but it’ll be quick blurbs and takeaways rather than transcribing every last Googley word.

Anticipation is high; Google shares just topped $900 for the first time ever.

“We are very fortunate to have two platforms,” says Sundar Pichai, who is now in charge of both Chrome and Android and also Google Apps. He’s addressing an I/O audience of 6,000 in-person attendees and some 1 million via livestream. He notes the advent of smartphones and connected devices has been a massive, rapid and global change over just the past six to seven years.

There have been 900 million Android activations to date, announces Pichai. Here’s some more context on those numbers, via Ina Fried.

As an update to Google Play services, Android product leader Hugo Barra announces three new location tools for developers that will reduce battery drain and add awareness of users’ location and activities for the purposes of geofencing and activity tracking (the latter thing is just like the Moves app for iOS, which understands the difference between walking, running and biking motions as you’re carrying a phone).

A few more of Barra’s Google Play updates that get cheers from developers will help sync accounts and notifications across multiple devices. Plus, new game developer tools on Android, iOS and web will show personalized leaderboards, help players challenge each other and save games.

Google introduces a brand-new development environment, Android Studio, for building applications. It helps rapidly visualize layouts across different devices, languages. This goes over extremely well with the developer audience.

And here’s some more stuff that developers care a lot about, and other platforms like Apple’s iOS don’t do a great job of. Later this summer, Google will add new Android analytics tools to help developers do things like track conversions from their app advertising and visualize revenue over time and geography. Plus, a biggie for people making new apps: Beta testing and staged rollouts with private feedback.

“I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling pretty APIed out,” says Barra. Yes indeed!

On to content and entertainment: Personalized recommendations for content in Google Play are rolling out “over the coming weeks,” and navigation is improved. This gets the mildest round of applause so far.

But here’s the real news: Google Play Music All Access, which comes with “a uniquely Google approach,” says Google content guy Chris Yerga. For some savvy handicapping, here’s Peter Kafka’s advance take.

What is interesting about it? The radio service is interactive (you can mess with what’s coming next), it has personalized recommendations and it includes Google’s collection blended with your personal library. It’ll cost $9.99 per month but there are some promo and trial options. Here’s a fuller summary from Mike Isaac.

Barra shows off a Galaxy S4 running Google’s Nexus version of Android rather than jammed with Samsung stuff. Not cheap, though. It’ll be sold for $649 on Google Play on June 26. Ina Fried has more here.

Back to Chrome and Chrome OS. The browser now has 750 million monthly active users, up from 450 million last year. As for Chromebooks, Sundar Pichai offers no actual numbers, but says they’ve been the No. 1 seller on Amazon for a while. (C’mon, where are the numbers?)

Next, an update on some of the underlying Web formats, tools and components that Google contributes to. This now includes a data compression proxy for Chrome for Mobile that sounds like like Opera and Onavo. Plus, some demos of what’s in the pipeline, including a nifty race car game played on a track made of five devices laying next to each other that keeps in sync using Web sockets. Lauren Goode has more on all the Chrome news here.

Sundar Pichai is giving out Chromebook Pixels to everyone at I/O, which they are rather stoked about.

How about them Google Apps? Lots of people use them — 74 of the top 100 U.S. universities. That was an extremely short segment.

And another little launch coming this fall: Google Play for Education. Google wants to help schools manage Android tablets, offering a library of apps recommended by teachers, and mechanisms to push apps directly to groups of student devices.

Plus, cute kids around the world use Chromebooks, as displayed in like the 30th feel-good product movie of this keynote.

Vic Gundotra says he’s here to introduce 41 new features for Google+, which I hope he is not going to go through one by one.

The G+ feed is now three columns, with posts tiled like Pinterest.

Google is also going to automatically tag posts with hashtags so people can find related content. These are extracted with image recognition and text analysis.

Also, Gundotra says as part of Google’s efforts to help computers get out of people’s ways, it will better support multiplatform conversations. That means: group messaging, persistent conversations between groups (a la GroupMe a few years ago), albums of shared images, synced notifications, free group video and support for Web, Android and iOS as of today.

On to photos: Google wants its data centers to be your darkroom, says Gundotra, who seems to only speak in slogans. G+ saves “all the pixels, because some memories are not meant to be downsized,” says Gundotra, with a nice visualization that shows how much larger G+ photos are than Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. Also, new tools will help users find their best photos and edit them, especially faces. Vanity, eat your heart out.

For further reading, Mike Isaac has detailed pullouts on the new G+ stream design and Hangouts.

“Auto awesome” features like collage generation, smile detection, making a series into a GIF and stitching panoramics are now generated automatically. And these features have been in “dark launch” so Google is already ready to spring them live on every photo you’ve ever uploaded.

Next up: Amit Singhal wants to talk about “the end of search … as we know it.” He’s the smiley guy who always talks about the Star Trek computer. Yup, there we go: He dreamed as a child of building the Star Trek computer for the world.

Google’s Knowledge Graph is today coming to Polish, Turkish and Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese, adding to nine existing languages.

Singhal announces conversational search for the desktop and laptop. Users can launch voice queries by saying, “Okay, Google.”

Plus, Google Now, the smart personal assistant app, is adding reminders, public transit and TV shows.

Johanna Wright demos a voice search using the new tools for Chrome and Chrome OS with the premise of planning a trip to Santa Cruz. Her computer listens to a set of queries including “How far is it from here” that returns directions with current traffic.

More snazzy voice demos: Saying “when does my flight leave” returns a personalized result based on email archives, “show me my pictures from New York last year” brings up photos with those characteristics, and giving commands sends emails and sets reminders. Basically it’s like Siri, but it seems to actually work.

Ina Fried has more on this voice search section here.

Maps head Brian McClendon comes next. Google has a long history of building and growing its map quality — subtext: Unlike some other noobs in the industry — and McClendon recaps the history of Google’s mapping layers: local data, imagery, street view (including underwater view) and base maps. Over 1 million websites are using Google maps today, he says.

Google Maps for iPhone is “sleek, simple, and let’s not forget, accurate,” says Daniel Graf. So what’s next for mobile maps?

Google is launching a unified five-point rating scale for local results, says Graf, which doesn’t really seem like an innovation to brag about. There’s also a nice new swipeable interface for browsing venues, plus discount offers appearing within listings (from Starbucks at first, with more to come). Also, some Waze-like features: accident reports and live rerouting. And, a tablet version for both iOS and Android. But none of it is ready yet. Will be out this summer.

An interface preview of the new desktop Google Maps UI shows that they’ve gotten rid of the uninformative map pins in favor of labels shown directly on each place. The big idea: “The map is the user interface.” Maps are personalized based on users’ history (like Google Now), so they can each navigate via their own landmarks and find related places and nearby streets each time they click.

A new transit schedule viewer looks a lot like Hipmunk. Users can also submit “photo spheres” from their phones by capturing a big multidimensional photo all around them. Also, here’s a mindblower: When you zoom out, the view of the Earth shows clouds in real time. And you can zoom all the way out to the Milky Way.

This isn’t released to the public yet, but you can sign up to check it out at maps.google.com/preview.

Larry Page appears onstage, a surprise given he just explained his vocal cord paralysis condition publicly yesterday. He has a message for developers: Technology is amazing.

Page is having a bit of a Bono moment. He explains the arc of Google’s vision: Technology should do the hard work, so people can live their lives. “I think we’re all here because we share a deep sense of optimism about the potential of technology to change people’s lives and help the world.”

Page says he wants to build great things that don’t exist, so press comparisons to competitors are overdone. “Being negative is not how we make progress. The most important things are not zero-sum.”

Progress displaces the past, Page notes. “I’m sure people in the future will think we’re just as crazy as we think people in the past were, having to do hunting or farming all the time.”

And to that end, recruiting young people to care about science is important. Page explains that Google participated in the upcoming movie “The Internship” as a way to market computer science.

And now something even less expected: Page takes audience questions. First up, predictably, is Robert Scoble. Page notes that he didn’t need to see Scoble’s picture of himself in the shower wearing his Google Glass. Point for Larry.

Page answers a question about the potential of a Web-based operating system for mobile; he’s disappointed about the industry state of warring platforms, saying, “The software you write should run everywhere easily.”

How does Google protect freedom, asks a woman from Colombia. It’s difficult and important, says Page, but transparency is key.

About fiber, Page says increasing capacity increases the potential for doing interesting things. Beyond gigabits, the next step is low-latency connections.

Meanwhile, Google stock is trading above $906, with the company’s market cap passing $300 billion.

On Glass production, Page isn’t willing to say much of anything specific. He says it’s about making users happy. He loves using it with his young kids.

Page’s advice for a kid: Try to cut deep to the real issues. The power grid and manufacturing, not incremental stuff. Asking how far are you off the raw materials cost helps you think about the longer view.

Here’s Mike Isaac’s story on Page’s appearance.

12:19 pm: Just going to add in a timestamp here to note this has been ridiculously long.

Page extends his positivity riff into limitations. He says he doesn’t just want to inspire computer scientists, he also wants lawmakers who understand technology. There should be something in the world like Burning Man, Page says, where technologists can have safe places to experiment on the effects of what they build without deploying them into the normal world.

On healthcare, Page says the main problem is regulatory issues around keeping medical information private. He says he got tons of emails after writing about his vocal cord condition yesterday. “After disclosing, I feel I should have done it sooner. Why are people so focused on keeping medical history private? The answer is insurance companies. That makes no sense. We should change the rules around insurance so they have to insure people.”

Page endorses a question about getting more women into tech, and he says that cheap smartphones are key to global social development.

Page goes offstage as it’s announced that Billy Idol is the evening I/O performer. Meanwhile, nobody has the strength to stand given they haven’t had nutrition or water since dawn. What I mean to say is, it’s finally over.

RELATED POSTS:

• Shoot the Moon: How Google Turned a Hodgepodge of Upgrades Into a Show of Strength
• Google I/O: Music, Maps, Messaging and More
• Larry Page Takes the Pulpit to Praise Technology, Snipe at Competitors
• Next Google Maps Update to Include Better Venue Search, Waze-Like Rerouting
• Google Gives Search a Deeper Voice and Adds Reminders and More to Google Now
• With Revamped Hangouts, Google Aims to Unify Messaging
• Google+ Gets a Bit More Pinteresting
• Google Chrome: 750 Million Active Users, Synchronized Web and Mobile Browsing
• Coming Soon From Google: A $649 Samsung Galaxy S4 Running Stock Android
• With Sights Set on Spotify (And Pandora), Google Launches a Music Subscription Service
• Google on Android: 900 Million Activations, New Tools for Developers Coming
• Google Doubles Down on Music Subscriptions, Which Means Google Isn’t Serious About Music Subscriptions
• Where Are They Now? Google I/O 2012 Edition.
• At I/O, Google Tilts Toward Android Services Over Android OS
• Google Downplays Expectations Ahead of I/O Developer Conference
• Will Google Deliver on Its Nexus Q Promise? Not at This Year’s I/O.
• Ahead of I/O, Google Wallet Drops Plans to Introduce a Physical Card
• Google Goes With Unified I/O Keynote (But Will It Unify Its Products?)

In a blog post, Page gave a full explanation as to his condition, which started about 14 years ago and has led to him losing his voice and even skipping last year’s annual meeting. Page said he was diagnosed with “left vocal cord paralysis,” which causes his left vocal cord to not move properly. In 2003 he was also diagnosed with Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, “a fairly common benign inflammatory condition of the thyroid which causes me no problems,” he wrote.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

Google will update its Wallet product at its I/O developer conference next week, but will not include the physical credit card that the company had considered launching at the event, according to sources.

Sources said the scuttling — for now — of an extended effort to roll out such a card was announced in a recent memo that also included the news that Google Wallet head Osama Bedier was leaving the company.

Those who have seen it said the Google card had a black face adorned with the whimsical rainbow “W” of the Google Wallet logo, a standard magnetic stripe and the usual raised numbers of a credit card embossed on it.

The card was part of Google’s larger strategic goal to know more about consumer purchases, given the immense potential value of that mostly offline-level data for its massive online advertising business.

Google is already sucking in that purchase data on many fronts — between Google Play payments, Google Checkout on the Web and also advertiser payments — in addition to the dedicated Google Wallet project.

But Wallet has been hampered by its focus on and use of NFC technology, which requires certain phones and special readers to make transactions. Google tried to make that easier by introducing a “cloud wallet” last year that accommodated existing credit and debit cards, but it could still go further toward mobile payments at the register without using NFC.

The dumping of the physical card plan was certainly abrupt, since it had actually been built into the new update of Google Wallet, said sources, and some partners had thought the search giant might be demoing it at the event.

But Google still plans to update its Wallet rewards, offers and loyalty points with the addition of a larger group of merchants, making it a fuller competitor to Apple’s Passbook. Within the Wallet, Google’s “proxy cards” help it get access to data by witnessing transaction flow to merchants.

However, these improvements won’t be integrated with another Google effort that’s similar, Google Now, which already includes support for mobile versions of United Airlines boarding passes and Fandango movie tickets in its Android mobile operating system version. Sources describe the Google Wallet and Google Now teams as “siloed,” which has presented some level of difficulty.

At Google, it was thought that a plastic card might be a way to attract a lot of consumers quickly with a payment method they are familiar with and that is convenient to them.

And the company seemed to have chosen a somewhat conservative approach. Sources said Google wasn’t planning to go so far as to become its own bank or try to disrupt existing interchanges — which would really shake things up in the credit industry — or to get data directly from Visa and MasterCard, which wouldn’t go over well with any number of players in the sector.

But sources also said that Google CEO Larry Page abruptly killed the card launch plan after he was displeased with a glitchy run-through demo last week. He had long been skeptical of a physical card solution, with several sources saying he felt it did not press forward innovation as payments startups like Square have done.

And as those plans fell apart, Bedier, VP of wallets and payments, was pushed out of the company. Google confirmed the departure yesterday; it followed the internal shift of former local and commerce bigwig Jeff Huber to its Google X unit.

Today, the Wallet program is within Google’s ads and commerce division, run by SVPs Susan Wojcicki and Sridhar Ramaswamy. Of the two, Ramaswamy is the exec directly in charge of Wallet.

Another recent addition to the Wallet team is Nik Sathe, who joined at the beginning of this year after being VP of architecture and infrastructure at eBay’s PayPal unit, leading the online payments giant’s technology strategy. Google never announced Sathe’s arrival at the company, and did not reply to a request on Wednesday to confirm it.

Lauren Goode contributed to this report.

RELATED POSTS:

• Shoot the Moon: How Google Turned a Hodgepodge of Upgrades Into a Show of Strength
• Google I/O: Music, Maps, Messaging and More
• Larry Page Takes the Pulpit to Praise Technology, Snipe at Competitors
• Next Google Maps Update to Include Better Venue Search, Waze-Like Rerouting
• Google Gives Search a Deeper Voice and Adds Reminders and More to Google Now
• With Revamped Hangouts, Google Aims to Unify Messaging
• Google+ Gets a Bit More Pinteresting
• Google Chrome: 750 Million Active Users, Synchronized Web and Mobile Browsing
• Coming Soon From Google: A $649 Samsung Galaxy S4 Running Stock Android
• With Sights Set on Spotify (And Pandora), Google Launches a Music Subscription Service
• Google on Android: 900 Million Activations, New Tools for Developers Coming
• Google Doubles Down on Music Subscriptions, Which Means Google Isn’t Serious About Music Subscriptions
• Where Are They Now? Google I/O 2012 Edition.
• At I/O, Google Tilts Toward Android Services Over Android OS
• Google Downplays Expectations Ahead of I/O Developer Conference
• Will Google Deliver on Its Nexus Q Promise? Not at This Year’s I/O.
• Ahead of I/O, Google Wallet Drops Plans to Introduce a Physical Card
• Google Goes With Unified I/O Keynote (But Will It Unify Its Products?)

But the company has apparently decided to stick with its business of making accessories that complement its phones. Motorola is putting the finishing touches on a new lineup of Bluetooth headsets and other add-ons.

Twitter user @evleaks, known for accurately predicting past moves, posted a photo on Friday of several new audio accessories under the “Sonic” brand name. Products include the Sonic Boom and Sonic Sliver II earpieces, as well as a Sonic Hub and Sonic Buds Bluetooth headphones.

Motorola is also working on a new external battery unit, tentatively being slated to carry the Atomic brand name, according to sources. That unit is designed to play on the need for better battery life, a focus at Motorola that predates the Google acquisition.

However, both the Atomic and Sonic names are still subject to change before launch, a source cautioned.

While the arrival of a new lineup of headsets and a battery charger isn’t exactly earth-shattering, it suggests that the new Motorola is interested in continuing in the business.

Company watchers have been studying each move to get a sense for what the new Google-run Motorola will look like.

A Motorola spokesman declined to comment.

Without giving details, Google executives, including CEO Larry Page, have been talking up the company’s coming products.

Asked at the recent D: Dive Into Mobile whether Motorola would be focused solely on phones, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said: “Think of it as phones-plus.”

Expect to hear more about Motorola’s future at our D11 conference at the end of May, where Motorola Mobility CEO Dennis Woodside and SVP Regina Dugan will be interviewed onstage.

In case you missed anything, here’s a quick weekend roundup of the news that powered AllThingsD.com this week:

1. Daily-deals site LivingSocial was hacked, compromising the names, emails, birthdates and encrypted passwords of 50 million users.
2. In an essay, Reed Hastings laid out his predictions for the future of streaming video, which includes not just his company, Netflix, but also HBO, ESPN and anyone else transitioning from a channel to an app.
3. Walt Mossberg reviewed the Galaxy S 4, Samsung’s new flagship smartphone, and concluded that “while I admire some of its features, overall, it isn’t a game-changer.”
4. What are Google’s plans for its high-speed Internet project, Google Fiber? Theories abound, but good luck divining an answer from CEO Larry Page’s words.
5. According to multiple sources, Twitter is testing local discovery features that will help you better understand what’s happening not just around the world, but also down the block.
6. Android’s seemingly inexorable ascension over the iPhone may not be inexorable, after all. A new report says customer loyalty will let Apple overtake Google in smartphone market share by 2015.
7. On the 10-year anniversary of its sale to Google, Applied Semantics co-founder Eytan Elbaz explained what he and his partners learned from starting up and getting acquired.
8. For the first time, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer publicly commented on the controversy created after Yahoo banned its employees from working from home.
9. Speaking of Mayer, she’s officially joined the board of wireless gadget maker Jawbone, and it’s likely to be a good fit.
10. Apple needs some new hit products to drive growth, and CEO Tim Cook says they’re on the way… just not until this fall.

To stay on top of the latest, follow AllThingsD.com on Twitter and Facebook, and subscribe to our daily email newsletter.

Lots of other people, though — including investors and the cable guys — don’t know what to make of Google’s moves.

They have two big questions:

• What is Google actually trying to do here?
• How much is Google willing to spend on whatever they’re doing?

And there are multiple theories to answer those questions, which aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive:

• It’s a sandbox for Google. It’s literally trying to figure out what goes into offering that kind of speed, and what happens when customers take advantage of it.
• Google thinks that by offering blazing-fast fiber in a bunch of cities, it will spur the likes of Comcast, Time Warner Cable and other incumbents to up their own investments in speed. And that eventually means that more people will have faster Internet, which is presumably good for Google.
• Google really does plan on wiring a big swath of the country. Because, why not? It’s Google. It can afford just about anything.
• During yesterday’s earnings call, analysts again tried to suss out what Google was up to. Both CEO Larry Page and CFO Patrick Pichette did a good job of speaking at length and not saying very much, beyond the notion that it would be good if lots of people had fast Internet.

Here’s one exchange between Bernstein analyst Carlos Kirjner and Page that is pretty representative:

Kirjner: “How do you expect fiber to have a major impact, given that it would take many billions and several years to pass something like 20 million U.S. homes — and after all of that time and money, you would be at best a mid-sized provider (Note: Comcast, the U.S.’s biggest broadband company “passes” — i.e., could provide service to — 53 million homes) in a market that accounts for less than half of your current business?”

Page: “I’m glad you’re very ambitious — the fiber industry’s not big enough for you. So I applaud that. We’d love to find businesses much bigger than our entire business to invest in, but I think that there’s only a small number of such companies that even exist. So I think on fiber, we look at places where we can provide products that we can make a very big difference in people’s lives, and we can make a lot of money and resources doing it. And I think it certainly meets that criteria.”

Does that spell things out for you? Me, neither. But Kirjner seemed to get some value out of it. In a note this morning, he writes:

• That he is now convinced that Google is not experimenting with fiber, but is serious about it.
• But! He also doesn’t think Google is going to embark on a truly massive effort: “Google is playing a very long game and does not aim to change the broadband access and pay-TV world in three or even five years … We remain skeptical that we will see a mass roll out involving billions of capex to build a fiber network passing millions of homes in the next few years, but think they will continue to expand Google Fiber’s footprint.”

Got it? Me, neither. But fascinating to watch.

Phones-plus. What in the world does that mean? Hard to say, though recent comments from Google CEO Larry Page — who’s equally giddy about the devices — may offer some insight.

Commenting during Google’s Thursday earnings call, Page said he, too, is enthusiastic about the work the Motorola division has done so far, and his remarks suggest that the handsets it’s expected to soon debut will be more durable than their predecessors, with better battery longevity.

“Think about your device,” Page said. “Battery life is a challenge for most people. You shouldn’t need to carry around a charger with you to make it through the day. If your kids spill their drink on your tablet, the screen shouldn’t die. And when you drop your phone, it shouldn’t shatter. There’s real potential to invent new and better experiences, ones that are much faster and more intuitive.”

And presumably that’s exactly what Motorola has been working on. Said Page, “Having just seen Motorola’s upcoming products myself, I’m really excited about the potential there. In just under a year, they’ve accomplished a lot.”

We should expect to hear more about this at our D11 conference at the end of May, where Motorola Mobility’s CEO Dennis Woodside and SVP Regina Dugan will be interviewed onstage.

But, at a time when mobile is increasingly big business at Google, the father of Android is no longer at its helm.

Google CEO Larry Page has substituted a grounded and effective operator, Sundar Pichai, for the independent Rubin.

It was certainly a sudden move.

Rubin had been confirmed to speak at our D11 conference in May; you don’t do that when you’re easing your way out. In the time between giving wide-ranging comments on Google’s plans two weeks ago and dropping out of a speaking slot at SXSW this past weekend, something changed.

But that doesn’t mean Rubin wasn’t ready to move on; as Android grew, he had been frustrated with the large-scale operational work, and wanted to return to passion projects in robotics and home automation, said sources close to Rubin.

In their explanations of the move, both Rubin and Page referred to Rubin’s desire to “start a new chapter at Google,” with Rubin saying he is “an entrepreneur at heart.” Though there’s much speculation that he might join Google’s “moonshot” group Google X, our sources said that was not necessarily the case.

Android — which began life as an independent company Rubin co-founded in 2003 — is now a massive and growing force in mobile. Sure, some might grumble about the many forks and flavors, but the software powers more than 750 million devices from scores of different hardware makers.

Android accounted for 70 percent of global smartphone shipments in the fourth quarter of 2012, according to IDC.

That’s compared to Google’s other operating system, Chrome OS, which along with Google Apps and the Chrome browser is one of Pichai’s main projects. Chrome OS and Chromebooks have yet to catch on with mass consumers, with limited success in the education vertical so far.

Putting Pichai in charge of the far more successful Android seems a way for Page to ease redundancy and friction, a move that many consider long overdue. If Google is going to really do mobile right, it shouldn’t be placing two bets.

Google’s two operating systems do have much in common, and increasingly so. Initially the two shared little, with Chrome OS aimed at non-touch laptops and Android focused on the phone. Android had its own browser, too. More recently, though, Chrome has become the default browser on Android, Chrome OS is on both touchscreen and non-touch devices, and Android has moved from the phone to tablets, TVs and even a few clamshell devices.

Beyond assigning Pichai to lead Android with existing VP Engineering Hiroshi Lockheimer, Page has made other changes toward a cohesive mobile strategy. For instance, long-time AdWords product management director Nick Fox recently moved to work on mobile advertising projects at Android.

But as for Rubin, when you talk to people in the technology industry about leadership, they continually return to comparisons to Steve Jobs. So Wednesday was a big day for invoking the late Apple CEO.

“Andy is more like Steve Jobs in his leadership style — top down,” said Keval Desai, a former Google product management director on ads who is now a venture capitalist at InterWest Partners. “Sundar is more of a collaborative and low key leader, but very effective at achieving big results.”

Rubin had sparred with Amazon, Alibaba and other Android partners, and for some critics seemed to have a definition of “openness” that was consistent only in his own mind.

Said one former Google executive, “Everyone loves Andy, but his leadership style is not ‘Googley.’”

Meanwhile, Pichai has a history of working with partners on Google technology — back to his first gig at the company in 2004 doing toolbar distribution deals with computer makers and browsers. He also worked on Google’s antitrust efforts to make sure Google search was an option on Internet Explorer.

Still, there’s a touch of Jobs in both men — Pichai’s recent Chromebook Pixel launch was a highly stylized event to present an end-to-end Google-made device that clearly had designs on Apple.

In the past year, Scott Forstall of Apple and Steven Sinofsky of Microsoft were both muscled out, so there’s an inclination to see a parallel in Rubin’s demotion.

But while Rubin may be a top-down leader and independent thinker, he remains close to Page, sources said. “This was not acrimonious,” said one. But “perhaps it also wasn’t harmonious,” noted another.

AllThingsD’s Ina Fried contributed to this report.

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.

This cataclysmic inevitability was brought to my attention over the holidays by my 6-year-old son. Far off though it may be, he believes our solar system’s imminent demise is cause for alarm sooner rather than later. (For him, that means sooner than getting a flu shot — but later than downloading the most recent service pack for Minecraft.)

Of course, I recognize my 6-year-old is thinking too far ahead. Too big.

But he did get me wondering, are the rest of us thinking big enough? Especially those of us who develop — and invest in — new innovations.

If not for being stuck on an antiquated United Airlines plane unequipped with Wi-Fi (is there any other type?), I may not have found the time to commit this thought to paper — I would likely have been overwhelmed by the next flurry of emails or meeting requests. It’s easy to lose sight of the big picture. In fact, as I survey the current startup landscape and consider the kinds of companies attracting VC dollars, it seems like the investing community isn’t thinking of the big picture at all.

Today, investors are less interested in transformative companies and more interested in trendy ones. Funding is flowing — and flowing fast — toward “quick-response startups.” These companies, more often than not, are launched during all-night hack-a-thons. They’re the wired brainchildren of eager coding buddies and Costco-like volumes of Red Bull.

Do many — or even any — of these startups, still in incubation, believe they can create a billion-dollar company on the heels of a market that’s already matured? No. And we don’t expect them to.

Because typically, companies like these aren’t founded to solve big problems — but rather immediate, narrow (and sometimes trivial) ones. For example, we now have dozens of VC-funded apps that help friends share photos, plan their weekend activities and order drinks more quickly in a bar. Yes, the first mobile photo-sharing app leveraged the social graph in unique ways and was — without a doubt — transformative. Three years later, however, startups continue to evolve the concept, but to what end?

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy a cool app as much as the next guy. But we can’t continue funding the companies that produce them at the expense of companies that produce truly breakthrough technologies and experiences. It’s bad economics, and, to the extent that this mindset pushes out true long-term transformative thinking, bad for humanity as well.

Indeed, these quick-response startups reflect — and perhaps are causing — a new and worrying trend: As a recent article in the Economist — “Has the ideas machine broken down?” — points out, today’s inventions are producing far less “economic impact” than inventions of the past. Progress actually appears to have slowed since the early 1900s.

It seems, in short, that we have reached a plateau when it comes to the more recent megatrends that stimulated great innovation: Games, social, local and mobile. Now that these digital revolutions are maturing, we’re just tinkering around the edges. Making marginal improvements. Tweaking the charger ports on our iPhones.

This trend, by the way, is not all that different from what happened in the late 90s — when the spread of the Internet was followed by VC investment in every dot-com commerce play imaginable, including dozens of pet-related dot-com startups. (In retrospect, one may have been too many.) In some ways, the early aughts saw a dearth of fresh ideas, too — right after the Web 2.0 innovations hit the market.

Now, we seem to be trapped by the narrowness of our own thinking again. And we have to ask ourselves: What will it take to buck this worrying trend, to push past this period of creative stagnation?

The answer? The same thing it took in the 90s and the early aughts: more companies like eBay, Google and Facebook — startups that brought to life world-changing and enduring ideas.

These companies may have been founded by “hacks” like the ones portrayed in “The Social Network.” But they were hacks that created massive waves of innovation, as did the founders of Yahoo!, Amazon and Twitter. They pioneered at the front end of huge emerging trends, from Web to commerce, from social to mobile.

Today, there aren’t enough of these front-end innovators. Years after these companies created new markets and experiences, we still have startups paddling out into the surf, hoping to catch the big tsunami that long ago passed them by.

What we need, in other words, are more wave-makers. More pioneers. More Yangs, Bezoses, Zuckerbergs, Brins and Pages, not to mention more Jobses, Fords and Edisons.

And make no mistake, the investor community — especially the VC investor community — has a role to play in encouraging that level of genius. In many ways, we just have to return to our roots.

It used to be that venture capital was the most ambitious kind of capital there was. Investors like me would fund startups, and not expect to see the payoff until five to 10 years down the line. We did so because we chose companies of extraordinary promise that trafficked in big ideas — businesses that, with enough time and money, could create products that changed the way humans interact on a day-to-day basis. Microsoft, Google and Apple — these are companies built with long-term VC investment. And they gave rise to the Age of Information.

So, going forward, let’s be as ambitious and smart with our capital as we once were. Let’s take more risks and be more encouraging of big ideas and bold leaders. We can’t get trigger happy with our funding dollars and settle for a quick fix or a “me too” idea.

Let’s also remember that innovation can benefit those living in the developing world. After all, innovation brought automobiles to India that cost less than $2,000 — and stoves to Africa that also charge cellphones.

And, most importantly, before we invest, let’s ask ourselves some crucial questions:

• Will this startup change the world — not just my world? Is the problem it solves large enough and its appeal wide enough?
• Does this company meet a critical, unmet need — or does it just bring simplicity or efficiency to an already-tackled issue?
• How difficult is the problem I want to solve? And is my solution unique, based on strong intellectual capital or a patentable idea? Or is it a piece of Web functionality that could be easily and quickly cloned, copied and resold?

In the past, investors haven’t always asked these questions. But if we start now — and answer them honestly and correctly — then we can unleash a new era of greater creativity and better returns.

If my tenure at Foundation Capital has taught me anything, it’s that investing in truly meaningful companies pays off. There are startups with world-changing ideas out there. And discovering what they are — and bringing their ideas to life — will require each of us to slow down and devote some time to big thinking.

If my 6-year-old son can do it, so can we.

Charles Moldow is a general partner at Foundation Capital, focusing on consumer Internet companies. He was previously a founding executive at TellMe Networks and at @Home.

On Friday, San Jose officials will publicly review a plan, backed by airport management, for the construction of a private facility that would house jets belonging to Google Chief Executive Larry Page, his co-founder, Sergey Brin, and Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt. The city council is expected to vote on the project in the spring.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

“Our acquisition of Motorola will increase competition by strengthening Google’s patent portfolio, which will enable us to better protect Android from anti-competitive threats from Microsoft, Apple and other companies.”
– Google CEO Larry Page

If the driving motivation behind Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility truly was the company’s patent arsenal, the search behemoth isn’t seeing much return on its investment.

This week, Google’s Motorola Mobility division was dealt yet another setback in its ongoing intellectual property spat with Microsoft, when a judge gutted some of the patent claims it had asserted against the software company.

On Thursday in Seattle, U.S. District Judge James Robart issued an order invalidating more than a dozen claims across three patents Google asserted against Microsoft. All three patents cover technology related to the encoding and decoding of digital video, and while Robart determined some of their claims to be legitimate (for now), he found that 13 were not specific enough to be brought to bear in this case.

And so he granted Microsoft’s motion for partial summary judgment, tossing those 13 claims. Robart’s decision significantly narrows the case, and bodes well for Microsoft, which claims that Google has failed to make the patents at issue available on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms.

While the move was controversial — and still ruffles some merchants’ feathers — the fact is, it seems to be working.

In the company’s earnings call on Tuesday, Chief Business Officer Nikesh Arora said, “Our core business is strong and investments in mobile and shopping this holiday season passed with flying colors. … Search performed well during Cyber Monday and Black Friday. We saw a greater proportion of queries with commercial intent.

Google offered some anecdotal evidence on how well the new business is performing, but clearly holiday shoppers did some good in boosting one of the company’s key metrics.

Arora reported that Front End Audio, which sells recording and live-sound equipment, said that sales resulting from their ads quickly made up 15 percent of the company’s revenue within weeks of launching. Further, the company reported that its click-through rates tripled and product conversions increased by 75 percent to 80 percent.

If only a portion of Google Shopping retailers are seeing those kinds of results, that could translate into meaningful ad revenue for the search giant, especially during peak times like the holidays.

During the fourth quarter, Google said its cost-per-click business increased 2 percent compared to the prior quarter, reversing a long period of declines. (The business was still down from the previous year, however.)

In a note to investors, Citi analyst Neil Doshi said he was expecting some improvements due to policy changes that Google made in regards to click arbitrage from its partner sites. He also believed that some uptick came from improvements in mobile rates.

But based on third-party research, the official October launch of Google Shopping clearly played a role.

Seattle-based Mercent, which provides retailers with tools to help them compete on Amazon and Google, said CPC rates increased to 70 cents per click on Google Shopping in December, up from roughly 55 cents in November. In June, it was less than half as much, or closer to 30 cents.

Mercent’s data is based on its customer base, which consists of 70 retailers using Google Shopping, including 1-800-Flowers, REI and Office Depot.

Indeed, Google’s efforts in the space are still in their infancy.

By its own count, it has tens of thousands of merchants participating in the platform and more than one billion products listed. Even Amazon is participating, despite it being one of the big holdouts. It buys product ads for the Kindle.

During the earnings call, analysts peppered Google’s Larry Page with questions about Google Shopping, but he mostly dodged them, especially when they were related to future product launches.

“I think that we are at the early stages of that. We just rolled out Google Shopping and we’ve seen tremendous uptake from merchants and users,” he said.

In response to a question about whether Google will enable consumers to pay or check-out within Google Shopping, Page said: “I’d expect the ease of buying things will improve over time, but I won’t comment on details. We are always focused on making our user experience better.”

Last month in an interview with AllThingsD, Sameer Samat, Google Shopping’s VP of product management, did clarify that the company has no aspirations to compete with merchants directly, even though the experience is starting to look more like a traditional e-commerce site.

“We aren’t planning on being a retailer,” he said. “We don’t view being a retailer right now as the right decision.”

Google justifies charging for Google Shopping because of the investments it has made over the past several months. It has completely overhauled the shopping experience, stressing product images over text and allowing consumers to easily conduct price comparisons across numerous sites.

The purpose of the efforts is to close the gap between it and Amazon as a starting point on the Web for shopping. Analysts estimate that 30 percent of consumers start their research on Amazon, whereas 13 percent of consumers start on Google.

Wait, that’s the second time you’ve mentioned Google as potentially a million-person company.

– Wired’s Steven Levy, pressing Google CEO Larry Page on his “moon shot” ambitions

There are several iOS apps I have barely ever opened — Stocks, Compass and the other random preloads. But for most of the most essential apps, one by one, I’ve found alternatives that I prefer to Apple’s defaults.

Instead of Music, I like Spotify, TuneIn and Songza. Instead of Weather, I prefer Weather Live. Instead of Notes, I try to use Evernote.

More often than not lately, I find myself using a Google iOS app. I’m now using Google Maps instead of Apple Maps, Chrome instead of Safari, and Gmail instead of Mail. Those three have all made it to my homescreen, where they replaced the in-house apps.

For the record, I wouldn’t consider myself a partisan of either Google or Apple — I’m praising Google’s mobile software here, but my primary phone is still an iPhone. I think iOS is a very nice operating system. But the Google utility apps increasingly fit my needs better, for some of the most important and basic things a smartphone does.

Why? Google Maps gets me lost less frequently and syncs with my search history. Chrome has tabs and syncs with my Web history. Gmail has actual functioning email search.

Apple left low-hanging fruit for app developers with its surprisingly underdeveloped default apps and some recent screwups — but it did take years for these quality alternatives to emerge.

Despite the emerging strength of Android, Google paid particular attention to building strong iOS apps in 2012. Today’s suite of Google iOS apps are lively, colorful and fit together. The company made a combination of upgrades that are big improvements — like redesigning Gmail for the iPhone — and also launched anticipated new apps, like the in-house edition of Maps and the Chrome mobile browser.

But what’s going on here is bigger than Google just devoting design and programming resources to make nice alternatives for users who prefer a competitor’s platform.

The reason these apps are so useful to me is because I’m already so invested in the Google platform as a longtime user. The apps remember my history and my most recent state, so they can sync from one place to the other. If I use Google apps, I spend less time retyping the same information on a smaller screen, which makes me safer and less annoyed.

So, in a way, it’s really more about Google being cross-platform than making something nice for iOS. The reality is, the iPhone is just one device I might pick up throughout the day.

The best and most useful services — Facebook, Twitter, Kindle and Evernote among them — are ones that have synced apps on every screen.

Though he didn’t come out and give a nice succinct quote about it, I recall that Google CEO Larry Page harped on this notion of a “multiscreen world” many times during Google’s most recent earnings call in October.

What Page did say (with a little bit of ellipsis glue) was: “Most of us carry at least one device, all the time, every day … And we use these devices interchangeably, depending on our situation … As we transition from one screen to multiscreens, Google has enormous opportunities to innovate and drive ever higher monetization … As screens multiply, it’s more important than ever that we converge our services.”

Of course, Page described his own scenario as switching between ”my Nexus phone, my Nexus 7 tablet and my new Chromebook.” The rest of us don’t necessarily have such homogenous and brand-loyal families of devices.

The thing is, we haven’t arrived in the happy converged multiscreen world yet. It’s full of friction — especially on the island of the iPhone.

For instance, I might prefer Google Maps, but iOS still automatically routes addresses to open in its own mapping app. And Apple also doesn’t make its newer and faster browsing engine available to outside developers, so Chrome for iOS isn’t competing on a level playing field with Safari.

Apple and Google are not going to stop competing anytime soon, so we users of both of them will be stuck in the middle. But at least we have more and better options.

And hopefully, that generates enough pressure for Apple to get with the modern multiscreen program in 2013.

That’s the position of Google CEO Larry Page, as articulated when he was asked about competition with Apple, Amazon and others by Fortune’s Miguel Helft for an upcoming cover story.

“It would be nice if everybody would get along better and the users didn’t suffer as a result of other people’s activities,” Page said. Sometimes, he added, Google is not “allowed” to make its products available as widely as it would want.

Sure, Larry, it would indeed be nice. Though obviously, Google in particular would benefit because its search engine works best when it can access and index everything.

Still, Google has been on the defensive lately in situations like the smartphone patent war and after the iPhone map app-endectomy.

And interoperability in tech is not exactly on the rise these days. Even the younger companies — including Instagram and Twitter — have gotten in on the hostilities.

Meanwhile, when asked about antitrust in search competition — something regulators in the U.S. and Europe are seriously considering — Page admitted to Helft that it was “complicated.”

Page asserted that vertical search companies aren’t really Google competitors because they don’t offer the whole package — say, weather, airline tickets, hotel reservations, and logistics combined all together for searchers who are planning a vacation.

“I think for us our strength comes from working with everybody, but we also need to make sure we’re serving our end users with a really great experience and that we provide that detailed information to people. Sometimes those things will be complicated.”

A new court filing in the pair’s infringement case reveals that Apple and Google have been discussing the idea of resolving their dispute over standard essential patents via arbitration. Earlier this month, the companies exchanged proposals about hammering out some sort of global licensing agreement over standard essential patents, and both seem to agree that binding arbitration is the way to go. From the filing:

Apple is also interested in resolving its dispute with Motorola completely and agrees that binding arbitration may be the best vehicle to resolve the parties’ dispute. Accordingly, on November 8, 2012, Apple sent Motorola a letter agreeing that the parties should enter into arbitration and proposing the parameters of the arbitration.

On November 13, 2012, Motorola responded to Apple setting forth further proposals for the scope of the arbitration, and the parties are now negotiating how to proceed. Included in the parties’ discussions are proposals for a stand-still to the parties’ pending litigations.

A stand-down in litigation? Binding arbitration? That’s a remarkable easing of tensions between two companies that have been sparring the way Apple and Google have. What happened?

A few things:

First, some background …

• We need to remember that Apple CEO Tim Cook hates patent litigation, which he sees as a “pain in the ass.” And he’s gone on record saying Apple would prefer to settle IP disputes where it can. “I’ve always hated litigation and I continue to hate it,” Cook told analysts in April. “We just want people to invent their own stuff. So if we could get to some arrangement where we could be assured that’s the case and a fair settlement on the stuff that’s occurred, I would highly prefer to settle than to battle.”
• The patents Google acquired through its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility haven’t exactly proven a formidable weapon in the smartphone patent wars. Indeed, the patent portfolio Motorola first brought to bear in many of its cases against Apple has largely been winnowed down to standard essential patents the company is obligated to license on FRAND (fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory) terms. And the fact that Google is using them as a weapon in these battles at all is drawing a lot of unwanted regulatory scrutiny ahead of the company’s imminent showdown with the FTC.

Now on to the specifics …


• Sources say those “secret” settlement talks between Apple CEO Tim Cook and Google CEO Larry Page earlier this year went reasonably well, setting the stage for the sort of tentative stand-down that’s now been proposed.
• Indeed, Apple actually made a settlement offer to Google earlier this year, sources say, but nothing came of it.
• Despite that, high-level background discussions between the two companies continued.
• Then, in October, Google abruptly withdrew a complaint it had brought against Apple with the International Trade Commission, not a month after the ITC agreed to review it.
• Sources say that withdrawal, which was never explained, was not a coincidence. Could it have been a goodwill gesture? Possibly. Certainly, it’s a clear de-escalation. As best I can tell, however, Apple has not responded in kind.

So what now?

That’s not at all clear. Though Google and Apple are talking arbitration, they are far from agreeing on the terms of an arbitration proceeding — let alone a reasonable royalty base. It’s entirely possible they never make it to arbitration.

But at least they’re talking about it.

Apple and Google both declined to comment on their negotiations.

iStockphoto | maybefalse

Big jump! But there’s a catch: Last year’s number was solely from mobile advertising. This year’s number includes mobile ads along with gross revenue from media sold through the company’s Google Play store, as well as the gross revenue from app sales.

So: Big number, but unless Google wants to break it down, hard to tell how meaningful it is.

(Update: Later in the call, CFO Patrick Pichette tells analysts the “vast majority” of that $8 billion comes from ads.)

Besides the premature release embarrassment — which Google blamed on its printer, R.R. Donnelly — Google will have to explain its financial results for the quarter, which were worse than expected. Analysts were expecting revenue of $11.86 billion and profit of $10.65 per share, but the company turned in $11.33 billion and $9.03 per share.

Google earnings calls tend to be pretty dry, but analysts have had an extra few hours to think up their questions, so let’s hope they’re extra spicy.

Here, for your viewing pleasure, are Google’s charts and graphs with the details.

1:32 pm: And, we’re getting started.

Larry Page will kick off with commentary.

“As you can hear my voice is still hoarse, so I’ll keep my remarks reasonably short. I’m sorry for the scramble today. … We had a strong quarter. I’m really happy with our business.”

We live in a world of abundant computing, Page says. Many of us feel naked without our smartphone.

People switch between their devices all day, he continues, and that disruption is an opportunity. As we switch from one sceren to multiscreens, Google has enormous opportunities to innovate and create ever better monetization, just like in search 15 years ago.

Google’s new runrate for mobile is over $8 billion. That includes revenue from users paying for content and apps, plus ads. “That’s quite a business.”

Page: Users want one consistent and beautiful experience. Screen independence is at the core of our strategy. When you’re using Chrome, switching between devices is painless.

That goes for advertisers, too. Google also wants to help them dynamically adapt campaigns across devices.

Page talks about search getting smarter. “There’s much more we can do to get you the right information at just the right time.”

1:41 pm: Patrick Pichette takes over. Had it not been for international currency fluctuation, composite growth would have been 6 percent higher.

Pichette clarifies that new mobile runrate includes ads and Google Play content as well as consumer spending on Play apps.

Now he’s doing the thing where he reads the numbers enthusiastically.

Continuing the focus on mobile revenue, Pichette notes some ads on mobile already performing better than desktop, but doesn’t go into details.

Peter breaks out that stat for a story here.

1:50 pm: Nikesh Arora with a business update.

Four major trends are driving growth: 1) rise of multi-screen consumer; 2) ability to deliver more precise answers to consumers; 3) Google offers lots of places to advertise, including brand options on YouTube and elsewhere; 4) Google’s apps/enterprise business.

1:59 pm: In response to a question about increased marketing spending, Pichette replies that Google spent a bunch on Nexus 7 marketing because it was so well reviewed.

Page talks about paid product search, says it’s a better experience for everyone.

Page posted his opening remarks on his Google+ page.

Pichette says that margins reflect the first full-quarter effect of Motorola amortization.

Q: Have desktop searches flatlined in the transition to mobile search?

Page answers: You’re asking the wrong question. It’s not about platforms, it’s about dynamically adapting for users in the right place and right time.

Q: What happens with semantic and vertical search?

Page answers: We’d love to include more people in the knowledge graph and will do more work in that area. On vertical search, Google needs to understand searcher’s context, what concepts mean, etc. “In general we’ve found we want to build more of the experience for our users but we’re always open to working with partners.”

Page replies to a question about television that he uses and loves Google TV, but it’s still in the early stages.

Pichette says nothing has changed in Apple search relationship and traffic acquisition costs, though Apple changed the word in its search box from “Google” to “search.”

Pichette says people seem to always assume CPC declines are about mobile, but there are other reasons like network growth and emerging markets.

They don’t take the bait about how they’ll spend their cash.

Pichette said the bulk of that $8b mobile runrate is still ads.

Page says he’s excited, really excited, and quite excited about Google Fiber.

He’s about to try it himself at his home.

On the conflict between apps and search, Page doesn’t really believe it. “Over time, if we do our jobs right, you’ll have the same capabilities in both places.”

Page talks up how awesome Chrome is on mobile devices again, and how few people use it now. He’s really been hitting on this topic lately.

Page says YouTube can keep him entertained for hours. He tries to come up with the words “Gangnam style”: “It’s the recent video with the horse dancing, with 400 million views.”

Pichette is getting a bit into the financial weeds, talking about how they don’t hedge revenues, they hedge profits.

Arora on product listing ads — this is where Google just switched from regular shopping search to relationships with merchants. We have a billion products, Arora says. The listing ads bring Google closer to users’ intent because they can show reviews, pictures and pricing information.

Page talks about the early days of mobile again; Pichette says that travel and retail revenue fluctuate based on seasons and the larger market for them.

2:35 pm: Page and Pichette do their thank yous, and we’re done.

“We had a strong quarter. Revenue was up 45 percent year-on-year, and, at just fourteen years old, we cleared our first $14 billion revenue quarter. I am also really excited about the progress we’re making creating a beautifully simple, intuitive Google experience across all devices.”

– Google CEO Larry Page, on the company’s newest Q3 press release, filling out his “pending” quote

Instead of coming out at the end of the market day, the earnings release popped out in the middle, more than three hours early.

Google’s filing with the SEC includes a “PENDING LARRY QUOTE” line marked in the draft for CEO Larry Page.

Shares immediately dropped — they are currently down 9 percent, to $687.30. Trading has now been halted.

CNBC is reporting that the halt came at Google’s request, not via an automatic circuit breaker at the Nasdaq. In a statement from its IR group, Google is placing the blame for the prerelease on its printer, R.R. Donnelley:

“Earlier this morning RR Donnelley, the financial printer, informed us that they had filed our draft 8K earnings statement without authorization. We have ceased trading on NASDAQ while we work to finalize the document. Once it’s finalized we will release our earnings, resume trading on NASDAQ and hold our earnings call as normal at 1:30PT.”

Here’s Citi analyst Mark Mahaney’s quarterly “cheat sheet,” so you can see what the Street was expecting to see later this afternoon:

If you’re up for a giggle, check out @pendinglarry, put up very, very quickly by a Twitter prankster:

To be fair, we released our earnings yesterday afternoon on Google Plus.

– Pending Larry (@PendingLarry) October 18, 2012

Page, whose rested voice seemed much improved, was more candid than usual, giving some nuance to his views on topics like regulation, mission-driven businesses, payments, education, social search and lots of other things.

For instance, here’s his retort to recent criticism of Google’s unified privacy policy:

“Virtually everything that we want to do, I think, is somewhat at odds with locking down all your information for uses that you haven’t contemplated yet. We don’t actually know how the Internet is going to work 10 years from now. So I think it’s a mistake to start carving out large classes of things that you don’t really understand yet, that you don’t want people to do.”

On the iOS maps controversy: Page said it was validation for people to notice “we’ve worked hard for these seven years.” He said it’s likely that Google will release another iOS mapping app of its own.

On innovating in hardware and software at the same time: It’s a lot better than it was in the pre-smartphone era. For instance, with Sergey Brin’s Google Glass Project, “every time I use it, I feel like I’m living in the future.”

How’s his voice healing? “Still a little hoarse, but I’m here, so I’m happy with it.”

More on regulation: “Overregulation of the Internet and restriction of what people can do is a big risk for us.” Page noted that before Google united its privacy policies, the “super-powerful, amazing” Google Now product would not have been possible, because Google wasn’t allowed to combine information across products.

Later, Page added that he’s excited about further opportunities for these contextual applications and personal assistants like Google Now. “There’s a lot of things we spend time on today that we’ll be able to automate and do a lot better.”

On YouTube: There’s potential for business growth, yes, but it’s also about making the world better by turning all those hours of entertainment into something more engaging.

On apps versus Web on mobile: People are too hung up on this distinction, Page said. Google does both, and it’s all getting blurred. Once Chrome is fully on Android, people will use their phones just like their desktop computers.

On intellectual property: He’s optimistic that people will be able to make money from content online. Right now it’s mostly through advertising, but there will be other ways, too.

On employee retention: For Google, it’s about setting goals high, having sound ethics, giving people ownership … and free food doesn’t hurt.

On Google’s role in payments: It’s all about phones. Google is working hard on this.

In the context of an answer about the future of education, Page gave a personal anecdote about how online education (and playing hooky!) was actually his personal preference: “When I was at Stanford, I just watched all my classes on video, because that’s how the computer science department did it. I’d never go to class. The day before the exam, I’d watch all my classes, and then, hopefully, I passed the exam. And it worked pretty well for me.”

On social and search: Page said that just like maps, social is not a separate dimension of search. That’s why Google is investing in Google+.

Finally, someone asked, “Are you having fun?” Page answered yes, and talked up Google’s social mission and its willingness and capability to take risks.

Here’s the full video:

More videos from the conference are here.