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Google on Monday released the first beta version of its software developer kit (SDK) for Android phones, a significant step in the company’s hope for “open” phone technology.

Google, which is leading the 34-company Open Handset Alliance to create the largely open-source Android software stack for mobile devices, already had released an “early look” SDK in November 2007. With the new beta SDK, though, the company is telling programmers they can get started in earnest creating software that will work on Android phones due to start shipping later this year, though stopping short of promising full compatibility.

“Since this is a beta release, applications developed with it may not quite be compatible with devices running the final Android 1.0,” Google developer advocate Dan Morrill said in a blog post.

Google's promised advantages of Android.

(Credit:
Google)

Among changes in the new SDK are the addition of the phone’s new home screen as well as some new applications for controlling the camera, playing music, setting alarms, viewing pictures, and dealing with SMS and MMS messages.

Android phones, notably HTC’s Dream, are due to ship in the fourth quarter.

Google had hinted in May that the new Android SDK was imminent, but the company ended up sharing it only with finalists in an Android programming contest until Monday. The Android Developer Challenge is awarding $10 million to coders to try to jump-start development efforts; on Monday, Google said a second challenge will be announced later this year that “will give developers a chance to build polished applications once hardware is available.”

Google hopes Android phones will be open to run innumerable applications, not just locked down to handle a relatively small number of authorized packages. To achieve this promise though, one key step is helping programmers to write that code. And SDK does just that, for example, by providing a software emulator that can run Android applications without an actual Android phone.

When it comes to Android’s APIs (application programming interface), though, some significant features were removed in the new API. “Due to significant API changes in the upstream open-source project and due to the timeline of getting certain Bluetooth profile implementations certified, a comprehensive Bluetooth API will not be possible or present in Android 1.0,” Google said.

Also removed is GTalkService, an API for instant messaging. “Due to the security risks inherent in accepting arbitrary data from ‘outside’ the device, the data messaging facility of the GTalkService will not be present in Android 1.0,” though the phone can use Google’s servers for Google Talk IM, Google said.

“We know that these changes will affect many developers who have worked with the prior early looks at the SDK, and we are very sorry for the resulting inconvenience,” Google said in the release notes. “We look forward to the possibility of restoring some or all of this functionality in a later version of the Android platform.”

For further details, see Google’s not terribly illuminating Android developer road map, SDK change list, discussion group, and some porting tips for programmers moving their code to the new SDK.

commentary

Writer Nicholas Carr has done it again.

In a recent post on Google (”The Omnigoogle”), Carr explains more clearly than I’ve ever seen why Google does what it does (invests in satellites, free Wi-Fi, open-source software, etc.), and why failure is all part of the plan.

Indeed, it wasn’t Carr’s comparison of why Google is much like Microsoft (Google controls the online economy, while Microsoft controls the desktop economy) that I found most interesting, but rather his explanation of why Google can fail so routinely in its product launches…and have that failure feed into its top-line revenue:

Because the marginal cost of producing and distributing a new copy of a purely digital product is close to zero, Google not only has the desire to give away informational products; it has the economic leeway to actually do it. Those two facts–the vast breadth of Google’s complements, and the company’s ability to push the price of those complements toward zero–are what really set the company apart from other firms.

Google faces far less risk in product development than the usual business does. It routinely introduces half-finished products and services as online “betas” because it knows that, even if the offerings fail to win a big share of the market, they will still tend to produce attractive returns by generating advertising revenue and producing valuable data on customer behavior. For most companies, a failed launch of a new product is very costly. For Google, in general, it’s not. Failure is cheap.

Shrewd on Google’s part, and insightful on Carr’s for figuring it out. It’s also cause for concern for those of us in businesses that have far less wiggle room for failure. Most companies can’t afford to fail more than once, if that. Google can afford to fail again and again and again, making it a fierce competitor, indeed.

From Android to Froogle, Google’s products regularly fail to make a prolonged impact on the industry. At the same time, however, news that Google is launching a product in one’s market is sure to turn venture capitalists frigid on investment, just as Microsoft’s attention to a market does. Google, then, has extraordinary power to fail and yet still cause competitors to fail.

Powerful…and scary.

We’ve covered Whrrl, and several of its competitors, already on Webware, but with the Where 2.0 conference coming up next week, I thought it’d be interesting to dive into this product just a bit more, since it represents some very interesting trends that are central to the creation of location-aware apps.

Only a few handsets, like the BlackBerrys, allow developers access to raw GPS data. For almost all other phones–including the
iPhone with its upcoming SDK–getting geo data means going deep into the machinery, and you cannot do that without the carriers or manufacturers giving you access. Sad, but true.

Whrrl is a fascinating project. The idea is that it tracks where you go, through your mobile phone, and makes that information available to your social network if you allow it. It also uses the behavior of other Whrrl users in general, and your friends in particular, to generate recommendations on places to go, and things to do based on behavior–not data entry.

No matter how cool a new mobile social app is, requiring people to sign up their friends to make it work will throttle its growth. A better bet is to allow people to leverage their existing social networks, like Facebook, as a starting point. But even then, new mobile social apps require some sort of buy-in from social net users to work. Until the big social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn get their own geo apps (not add-ons, but actual integrated features), I predict that growth of the mobile social products will remain limited.

Collecting geodata has to be passive

Geolocation means more than GPS

If you want to get good data, you’ve got to do deals with the mobile carriers

Privacy is everything

There are interesting services that rely on users entering in their location, but that makes for a very different experience and, more importantly, a horribly incomplete data set.

People have social network fatigue

For example, if you frequent a particular restaurant, you don’t have to do anything; Whrrl will know it. But it will also know which of your friends go to the same joint and what other restaurants they hang out at. And then it will be able to recommend just those establishments to you.

(Credit:
Whrrl)

It will also have the capability to show you where your friends are in real time. For an old guy like me, that’s pretty creepy. But I think a younger generation of Facebook users might find it a natural extension to social networking.

Relying on the global positioning system only gets you so far. For one thing, only a small (but growing) proportion of existing mobile devices are GPS-enabled. For another, GPS is not accurate enough to identify behavior. Whrrl, for example, uses raw data from GPS receivers (on the phones that have them), in addition to proprietary analysis that includes group analysis of other users’ signals and “dwell” time at certain coordinates, to determine not just where users are at a given moment but whether they are inside or outside a building.

Other geolocation technologies that matter are Wi-Fi location (see Skyhook Wireless, which Whrrl is partnering with), cell tower-reported location (which only provides a rough position centered around the tower), multiple cell tower triangulation (more accurate), RFID-reported data, HDTV signal-based geolocation, and of course user-reported location. Smart geo apps will be agnostic to the input method of geo data.

The geo app companies are going to have to do a crackerjack job of “stewarding” (as Whrrl CEO Jeff Holden says) the personal location data they collect. They’re also going to have to educate users on managing their geoprivacy. For an interesting take on this, see FireEagle. (See “You are here, sort of.”)

Here are the trends that Whrrl illustrates, that I think we will see echoed a lot at the Where 2.0 show:

I’ll be scanning for interesting new geo apps at the Where 2.0 conference next week, and will be sure to report on the Launchpad event Monday night when several companies launch new initiatives.

Whrrl tracks your real-world behavor. Scary? Sure, but also useful.

The most I have ever comprehended about this anomic apparition is that it is somehow meant to signify: “Hold on there, mate. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on. The ole’ system’s playing up a bit here and I’m trying to get it sorted out.”

I would therefore ask the core of superlative minds at Apple to please find me another plumber.

Or perhaps: “I can tell you’ve got no idea about tech, so just do what I say. Go to the cache and click on the third choice down.”

This little Swirly Rainbow Circle Thingy might have been a bug. Or the introduction to some errant and very nasty computer game.

But something is now coming between us.

You know the kind of thing: “Your trash is fuller than Meg Ryan’s lips and the Big Lebowski’s belly. Empty it, you moron.”

The Swirly Rainbow Circle Thingy never, ever tells me what’s going on. Or how long it will be chasing its tail around my desktop.

Well, except for the dialogue part.

In other words, it’s like a plumber perched beneath your sink, his upper bottom portions waving to the sky and his voice telling you: “Hmm. Aha. Uh-huh. Aha. Hmm.”

It’s that little Swirly Rainbow Circle Thingy. You know, the one that tells you, well, what is it supposed to tell you exactly?

I even wondered if it was about to burst open and turn into a dancing leopard or wriggling worm.

My MacBook and I are at a difficult stage in our relationship.

(Credit: CC Cessna206)

Or even: “This MacBook is wasted on a bonehead like you. Get yourself a PC and like it.”

It arrives and disappears as suddenly as a drunken gatecrasher.
At times I confess I lose my patience, take out the battery and start my MacBook up again. Without fail, the Swirly Rainbow Circle Thingy will be gone.

The first time I saw it, I had no idea what was going on. It whirled away on my desktop just like a dog that is trying to communicate with you and, in its frustration, begins to chase its tail in circles as if this will somehow make things more obvious.

We’ve traveled the world together. We’ve written heinous insults together. And we have refused to countenance entreaties from sites of ill-repute together.

I would like something that talks to me, that gives me at least a clue about what is going on.

(Credit:
EPS)

Comparing data from different locations allows companies to get an idea on how to lower their usage, said company CEO Jay Zoellner.

Drilling down: EPS' system lets plant operators get detailed information on energy usage, down to the level of a facility or a process like making buttermilk.

EPS, an energy management company founded by former Enron employees, has developed a system for remotely tracking energy usage at manufacturing facilities with a high level of detail.

The company on Thursday intends to introduce the system, called xChange Point, a hosted application that monitors energy usage at manufacturing facilities and provides Web-based reports to energy managers.

“A lot of companies are struggling with their carbon emissions reduction targets. They need a way to manage and verify they’ve had an impact,” he said.

But in the past year, carbon management and sustainability initiatives are rising in importance, rather than only reducing energy spending, Zoellner said.

xChange Point, which includes a hardware device placed at a customer’s location and software to analyze data, gives those companies more accurate information and a way to report any carbon emissions reductions, he said.

The company, founded in late 2001, has done business running energy efficiency programs and operating alternative energy generators, including co-generation plants. Typically, manufacturers look for a two-year payback on any kind of energy investment to lower their costs.

To set a presentation to run automatically in PowerPoint 2007, open the file, click one of its slides, choose the ribbon’s Animations tab, check Automatically After in the Advance Slide area to the far right, and click Apply to All to the left of that option. Tweak the timing of the slides by clicking the Slide Show tab, choosing From Beginning at the far left, and noting which slides stay visible too long, and which need to stay on screen longer.

Click 'Automatically after' in PowerPoint's Slide Transition task pane, and set a time for your slides to run automatically.

Now select the next slide, choose Slide Show > Action Buttons, and add both a Next and Previous button. You can also add a Home and/or End button. (If you customized the appearance of the Next button on the first slide, you can copy and paste it onto the next slides.)

Add manual slide controls
You can combine automatic slide timings with viewer slide controls to let people decide when to move to the next slide, while also moving them after a set time if they take no action themselves. Start by following the steps above to apply lengthy onscreen time for each slide. Then in PowerPoint 2003, select the presentation’s first slide and choose Slide Show > Action Buttons. Click the Next button, and a plus sign appears on the slide. Click the spot on the slide where you want the button placed, and leave Hyperlink to: Next Slide selected. You can resize the button, or double-click it to view other AutoShape options.

Place slide controls in your PowerPoint 2007 presentation via a single setting in the Set Up Show dialog box.

Add slide controls to your presentation in PowerPoint 2007 by selecting the Set Up Slide Show button to open the Set Up Show dialog box.

Thursday: a free utility makes it easy to customize your right-click menus.

Once you’ve finished putting your presentation’s slides in order, select one, and in PowerPoint 2003, click Slide Show > Slide Transition to open that task pane. In the Advance slide section of the task pane, check both “On mouse click” and “Automatically after” and enter the time you want the slide to remain visible. While you’ll likely want to test the automatic slide loading to ensure that a slide doesn’t stay on screen too long or disappear too quickly, it’s a good idea to play it safe by clicking Apply to All Slides.

It’s your presentation, and you have every right to control its pace by deciding when to move to the next slide. But there are times when you want to let the presentation run itself, or you may want to allow the person viewing it to decide when to move to the next slide (or maybe even a little of both). You can convert any PowerPoint presentation into a self-running slide show, or add controls that let the viewer go to the next slide, with just a few simple settings.

Ten seconds should be sufficient for most slides; if your slides take longer than that to read, maybe you should be splitting them into multiple slides, or rewriting them. Remember, brevity is the soul.

In PowerPoint 2007, you add slide-control buttons simply by clicking the ribbon’s Slide Show tab, choosing Set Up Slide Show, and selecting Manually under Advance Slides. This adds a control bar in the bottom-left corner of the slides with icons for going to the next slide, returning to the previous slide, annotating the slide, and moving to other slides in the presentation, among other options.

commentary

Last night, I was reading my Arsenal news in the
Safari browser, and the browser dumped me back to the home screen repeatedly, something that never happened in the iPhone 1.0 world. E-mail routinely dies on me, and those App Store applications? It’s rare that I can get through a Sketches session without the application dying.

Could the recent foibles have something to do with Jobs’ lack of oversight due to encroaching health problems?

This is great, but what I’m waiting for is a tool that will let me downgrade to the older iPhone 1.1.4 software.

Nine days after Apple released its
iPhone 2.0 software, the code has been cracked. PwnageTool 2.0 will successfully unlock your iPhone.

Steve Jobs once ridiculed Microsoft for cloning its software (”Redmond, start your photocopiers”), but this feels like Apple desperately trying to come up with a suitable rendition of the so-called blue screen of death.

If, indeed, Apple is so dependent on its iconic CEO, and if the recent slip-ups have anything to do with Jobs taking a lighter hand at the helm, then Apple’s future may not be as rosy as some (like I) hope. Microsoft seems to have built a deep bench of talent to take over in Gates’ absence (though I, for one, think it would do even better without Ballmer at the helm). Apple? I’m not so sure.

Why? Because iPhone 2.0 remains very buggy.

For Jobs’ sake, I hope not. But if his apparent illness is affecting his performance and, hence, the performance of his company, Apple shareholders should know.

Your thoughts?

As a hard-core Apple fan, I’m starting to wonder if there’s more to this fiasco than meets the eye. It’s very unlike Apple to have a sloppy upgrade (iPhone 2.0), terrible customer experience (activation problems at the launch of the 3G iPhone), and a crummy product launch (Mobile Me). Rumors have been swirling that Steve Jobs’ health is in significant decline.

But Apple’s carrier partners sure cared about that number. Apple negotiated extremely favorable deals for iPhone 1.0, getting a piece of AT&T and other carriers’ revenue for data services while retaining complete control over what applications would appear on the device.

This just might be the aftereffect of the unlocked iPhones. Apple executives downplayed the actual number of unlocked iPhones several times this year, claiming they couldn’t estimate how many iPhones had actually been unlocked and that in any event, it just demonstrates demand for the product.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveils the 3G iPhone. For more photos from the event, click on the image.

So the big question: will the iPhone 3G–and new business model–enable Apple to meet its sales target for 2008 of 10 million units? If Apple has sold 6 million units to date, as Jobs said in his keynote, that means the company has a long way to go, having sold just 2.3 million iPhones so far in 2008.

The fact that the new iPhone won’t be available until July 11 was one of the most surprising things to emerge from this morning’s keynote. Apple, of course, never put a finer grain on when it expected to ship iPhone 3G beyond “next year,” which Jobs quoted a few times in response to questions about the issue in 2007. But few expected the company to miss the one-year anniversary of the iPhone’s debut with the new model, and at the very least, Apple itself had promised the iPhone 2.0 software by the end of June.

Apple’s Greg Joswiak, vice president of worldwide
iPod and iPhone marketing, reiterated Apple’s 10 million shipment goal in an interview after Jobs’ keynote, so it’s not like Apple is backing down. There are two main reasons why the company can still be confident: the combination of 3G and the cheaper price will spur potential customers who have been sitting on the sidelines in countries where the iPhone already exists, and a total of 70 countries will get official access to the iPhone, including major new destinations like Canada and Australia. In addition, Jobs hinted to CNBC later in the day that the big prize–China–could be coming sooner rather than later.

Apple held up its end of the bargain in one sense–delivering a solid product that enticed people to switch networks and drove data usage–but failed to secure its product against those who wished to unlock it from its designated networks, forcing some carriers to watch their rivals reap the benefits of iPhone data usage. Wireless carriers may be opening up their networks in new and interesting ways, but their influence on the mobile market isn’t waning just yet.

The second chapter of Apple’s iPhone era is almost ready to begin, and it’s already clear that things will be a little different this time around.

That means Apple will have shipped almost no iPhones from roughly the middle of May to July 11: about two whole months, although AT&T stores took longer to run out of their supply. We’ll get a more precise number for iPhone shipments during Apple’s third fiscal quarter, which ends in June, during the company’s earnings call in July. But no matter how you slice it, that’s a large gap that points to a bit of a supply chain snafu at some stage along the way.

From a features point of view, the new model delivers on what
iPhone customers want and need. Yes, you still can’t do mobile messaging, and I still don’t think you can do cut-and-paste, which is just bizarre. But Apple has added just about everything else people have asked for or complained about in iPhone 1.0: faster networks, secure access to corporate e-mail, precise location-based services, and third-party applications.

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET News.com)

Of course, compromise is part of any good partnership. In exchange for giving up revenue sharing and its novel at-home activation service, Apple is getting a subsidized iPhone. That will lower the price of entry into the iPhone world and should accelerate sales without dinging Apple’s product margins to the degree that would be result if Apple absorbed the cost decrease itself. The increased sales should also offset the loss of the shared revenue.

What’s perhaps more interesting is what Apple has learned about the mobile phone business. It’s not all that surprising that Apple, which has a proud legacy of product design and software development, would have created an excellent product that has the rest of the industry scrambling to overtake.

It’s always interesting to watch a company try to make its way into an entirely new business; those who fail far outnumber those who succeed. The most common reason why many fail is because they forget to learn from their initial experiences, or assume they know better based on their past successes.

But several developments later on Monday indicate that Apple has had to learn just as many lessons about playing in the mobile phone market over the past year as it has taught the mobile phone industry about product development.

Apple may not proclaim it from on high in the Stevenote, but today the company showed that it’s willing to learn from its mistakes, and to adjust its business model when prudent. So far in its iPhone era, Apple has wisely tackled the hard problem first–making a great product, and continuing to improve it–and is now making the kinds of changes to its business model to make sure the iPhone really does turn into the third leg of the company’s business some day.

It’s not clear whether Apple will introduce technology changes into the new iPhone that makes it harder to jailbreak, then unlock, but it will at least require U.S. iPhone buyers to sign a two-year contract and activate the iPhone on AT&T’s network before they can take it home. This won’t eliminate unlocking, but could discourage it to some degree.

The faster speeds, additional countries–and a tweak to Apple's business model–should help the company hit its goal of shipping 10 million iPhones in 2008.

Few people who pay even scant attention to the technology industry could claim to be shocked by the introduction of a faster iPhone earlier on Monday by Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Apple has sold 6 million iPhones since June 2007, Jobs said, and will likely sell a few more once the new model arrives on July 11 with a faster networking chip, GPS capabilities, and a software upgrade that’s an IT manager’s dream for a mobile device.

About 90 minutes after Jobs concluded his keynote, AT&T held its own press conference to announce some major changes in the way iPhones are sold. You now must immediately agree to a two-year contract with AT&T whether you buy the iPhone in one of Apple’s stores or one of AT&T’s stores, and there will be no online ordering. AT&T and Apple have ended their revenue-sharing agreement, and Apple also said that the “vast majority” of its new carrier agreements overseas do not involve revenue sharing. To top it off, iPhone data plans are now $10 more expensive.

(Credit:
James Martin/CNET News.com)

The Symantec report follows a study from MessageLabs also illustrating the increased use of automated spam relays.

In looking for a reason behind the one-month increase, Symantec speculated it had something to do with the increase in e-mail with sensationalistic news headlines that included links to downloadable malware. These include malicious spam campaigns emulating e-mail from CNN and MSNBC.

Compromised PCs sending spam had been part of the background noise until recently, when their usage surged in September.

Turkey topped the list of countries hosting spam-sending compromised PCs, responsible for 12 percent of such traffic, according to Symantec. It was followed by Brazil (9 percent), Russia (8 percent), the U.S. (6 percent), India (6 percent), China (6 percent), Germany (5 percent), Argentina (4 percent), Poland (4 percent), and Thailand (3 percent).

(Credit:
Symantec)

After seeing a 37 percent drop in botnet-related spam for August, Symantec reported a 101 percent increase in September. The growth appears to be focused in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, with South Korea experiencing the largest increase at 4,236 percent. It was followed by Kazakhstan (761 percent), Romania (607 percent), Saudi Arabia (555 percent), and Vietnam (540 percent).

Compromised computers that send spam as part of their regular botnet activity increased dramatically in September, according to a Symantec study (PDF) released Monday.

And at 11 a.m. PST/2 p.m. EST Thursday, here’s the live link for the chat. Join us!

By way of background, check out News.com’s 2008 voters’ guide that we published in January. John Edwards may not be in the race any more, but the other candidates we profiled still are.

I’m doing a live chat Thursday about technology, politics, and the 2008 presidential election, and you’re invited to participate. Topics include: Which candidate is the most tech-friendly? Who will protect online liberty the best? Who actually understands economics? And how much does any of this matter when candidates are talking about Iraq, the economy, and health care instead?