Google's OS dreams calling on Linux

Can Google's application development prowess be transformed into a next-generation mobile operating system?

It seems increasingly likely that Google, the ubiquitous tech company, is about to throw its hat into the race to develop the next big mobile device. Google's no gadget-maker, but it does develop quite a bit of software, and reports have been building that the company is relatively close to releasing the Gphone. (Our style department says we have to spell it that way.)

Most people who have wandered onto the Internet in the past couple of years are familiar with Google. The company's various applications from Gmail and Google Docs to Google Desktop and the Google Toolbar are likewise familiar to lots of PC users. When it comes to smart phones, Google Maps is almost a must-have application, and it comes standard with the iPhone.

So Google's got experience in taking applications built for a PC and moving them over to a smart phone, which will be a key part of transforming smart phones into true mobile computers. A mobile operating system, however, is an entirely different undertaking.

It's very much a wide-open race to develop the next advanced mobile operating system. Symbian has the lead worldwide thanks to its close partnership with Nokia, the largest shareholder in the company. Windows Mobile is the second most widely used smart-phone operating system, according to Forward Concepts, and Linux is the third.

According to reports, Google wants to expand on that last category with its rumored mobile OS. The Gphone would be based on Linux and supported by advertising, which to many techies probably sounds like the ultimate Silicon Valley marriage made in hell. Try to forget, for a moment, about using a smart phone inundated with advertising messages and think about the implications of a Google-developed smart phone operating system.

It's still the very early days for this type of computing. Symbian and Microsoft have staked out opposing positions, but no company with the size and clout of Google has thrown its support behind the Linux development efforts for mobile computing.

Mobile phone makers are intrigued by Linux because of the constrained memory and power requirements of mobile computers and the ability to customize a Linux base for their products. Lots of work has already been done to make Linux modular, or to create building blocks that can be mixed and matched depending on what is desired. Timothy Kamada of Access told me earlier in the year that carriers and phone makers also like the idea of having their own branded interface on the phone, rather than relying on Microsoft and Symbian's branded operating system. If you go that route, that means you have to differentiate your products mostly on hardware, and that can be tricky.

But established phone makers and carriers looking for an answer to the iPhone are finding it hard to bet on a single Linux provider. Palm is floundering, with the recent news that the Linux-based version of Palm OS has been delayed again. Access, the company that acquired former Palm OS developer Palmsource, isn't faring much better. The folks at OpenMoko have gotten some buzz, but when First International Computer is your only hardware partner, you've got an uphill fight ahead of you. MontaVista has had some success with Motorola, and Wind River has been doing some interesting work, but are they in the best position to persuade the world to take a chance on their products?

Google, on the other hand, is Google. They've got open-source credibility, they've got mobile phone pioneers on board with their acquisition of Android in 2005, and some of the best and brightest engineers that Silicon Valley has to offer (not to mention enough cash to fund four or five internal projects that might have produced the eventual winner). As mobile phones start to deliver the same Internet experience as a PC, mobile search will be a vital application.

The part that trips me up is the notion of an advertising-supported Gphone, something also reported by BusinessWeek as a key part of Google's aims for this market, along with its intention to go after the 700MHz spectrum auction. You're going to have to offer people something pretty special to have ads--even targeted ads--be an integral part of the phone experience, which has thus far been mostly ad free. BusinessWeek thinks Google could be trying to do a television model on your phone, where voice and data minutes are free when the phone user agrees to accept advertising. While that might work to a certain extent, I think people have shown themselves quite willing to pay for things that get around the increasing reach of advertising. The New York Times reported Monday, however, that Google may be forgoing a licensing fee for its software in favor of the advertising model, which could make the software that much more attractive to phone makers.

Despite a lack of smart-phone experience, Google has to be taken seriously in this market. It has the talent and the assets to worm its way into mobile phones, a consumer-friendly brand, and the industry heft to stick around through a few development cycles. The look and feel of any Gphone will be crucial to its chances, and without any solid information to that effect, it's hard to say whether this thing will be a success or a flop. But it's not hard to imagine that Google is making mobile development executives at Symbian, Microsoft, and Palm think long and hard about the current projects they have under development.

article

Canon's PowerShot G9 gets reviewed

Those upset with Canon over its exclusion of RAW in the PowerShot G7 will find their biggest gripe squashed in the G9, and just in case you're interested in seeing how this uniquely designed amateur cam held up to critiques, here's the skinny. Reviewers were understandably elated to be able to capture shots in RAW and tweak till their hearts were content, but also noteworthy were the excellent results found by simply switching to Auto mode and taking a load off. It was suggested that this camera "not only makes you feel like a better photographer, but helps you become one too," referring to the wealth of functions that catered to both beginners and seasoned veterans alike. Unfortunately, there seemed to be a noticeable amount of noise when the ISO exceeded 400, and while it was built for abuse, you should know that it was deemed "one of weightiest, most brick-like compacts out there." Overall, the G9 was dubbed hard to beat, and if you're scouting a solid DSLR backup, you should certainly give the read link a bit of your attention.

Hitachi rolls out CP-A100 projector with short throw distance

Those cramped for space in their conference rooms or classrooms may want to give Hitachi's latest projector some serious consideration, with it boasting an uncommonly short throw distance in addition to some decent all-around specs. Specifically, Hitachi says the projector will give you a 60-inch image from a distance of just 1.4 feet, with it also able to be placed horizontally or vertically, or mounted on the ceiling for that matter. Otherwise, you can expect a standard XGA resolution, along with a 400:1 contrast ratio, a 2,500 ANSI lumens, and some networking capabilities that'll let you link a bunch of 'em together. No word on pricing or availability just yet, although you can probably expect to pay a bit of a premium over slightly less versatile projectors.

Seagate's hybrid-drive market

The Scotts Valley, Calif., company announced Monday that the Momentus 5400 PSD hybrid hard drive will be shipping in volume in notebook PCs. The 2.5-inch hybrid drive is a 160GB drive with 256MB of flash memory. Adding flash chips to the mix has produced notebooks that can get 50 percent better battery life, according to Seagate.

Though Seagate is not the first to market with mechanical hard drives combined with flash memory chips--that was Samsung a few months back--the move will likely drag the other major hard-drive makers, such as Hitachi and Fujitsu, into the mix.

There are several potential inhibitors to widespread adoption of hybrid drives by the PC industry: the current expense of flash memory; a possible need for better optimization with PC operating systems, particularly Microsoft's Windows Vista; and hybrid drives' availability from a variety of sources.

Still, the timing for introducing the Seagate drives could be good. Several major notebook manufacturers have announced their intentions to use hybrid drives. The idea behind them is that storing some data on flash chips is faster and uses less power because it means not accessing the main storage of the mechanical drive. Notebooks, therefore, are a natural application for them.

"It absolutely makes sense to take advantage of nonvolatile semiconductor memory and the best aspects of the hard-disk drive technology," said John Monroe, a vice president of research at Gartner. Using the two technologies together has benefits for users, including faster boot times and better battery life.

Seagate says it's positioning the Momentus 5400 PSD as a mainstream option that balances the use of flash chips with the affordability of traditional hard-disk drives. Sony's Vaio SZ650 is currently shipping with the new hybrid drive from Seagate, and four other PC manufacturers have also signed on. It all depends on the order volume, but Seagate says its hybrid drives will sell for an approximately 20 percent to 30 percent premium over its standard hard-disk drives. A 160GB hard drive from Seagate, for example, costs approximately $130.

But it's likely going to take several years for these to catch on in the mainstream notebook market. In three or four years, hybrids still won't account for more than one-third of the drives used in notebooks, according to Gartner's calculations.

More work to be done
"It's going to take a while to get there," Monroe said. "There has to be continuing refinement in the OS, so you can take more advantage of this kind of hybrid technology."

Many are taking a wait-and-see approach, according to Jeff Janukowitz, research manager in IDC's storage group. Hybrid drives are still only beneficial for PCs running Windows Vista, and there have been some concerns about OS support from Microsoft and Vista, he said.

Though Seagate insists that it "works fine with Vista," there's still more work to be done so that each PC knows how to actually utilize the flash cache, particularly which kind of information to write on the flash.

"The BIOS (basic input-output system) doesn't always know how to talk with flash on hard drive," said Melissa Johnson, a Seagate product marketing manager. "You're not going to see a benefit from that side. It's...going to work, you'll still get 20 percent faster boot-up time, 50 percent batter savings, (but) the industry needs to learn to take advantage of the potential."

Flash capacity barrier
But right now, the biggest barrier to widespread acceptance is the capacity of the flash in the hybrid drives. While it's beneficial to be using some flash memory to store certain data, it's a piddling 256MB. One of Apple's iPod Nanos, for size comparison's sake, contains up to 8GB of flash memory.

Hybrid drives "won't be truly interesting until there are 2-, 4- or 8-gigabyte caches on the hard disk drive," said Monroe, and that is still a couple of years off. The reason is the price of flash, whose cost is still prohibitive for most major manufacturers of notebook PCs. The margins on notebooks are very thin, and tossing a flash-only hard drive into one drives the cost way up.

Getting the entire hard drive industry aboard will be key to wider adoption, says Gartner's Monroe. Yes, it's helpful that Samsung and Seagate are making hybrids, but others need to follow, and standardization is key. "Right now, certainly if Seagate hard disk drives and Samsung hard disk drives are not virtually interchangeable for (for example) a Dell notebook, that's not a good thing. Dell wants them to be interchangeable because they want more than one source," he said.

Hewlett-Packard, the biggest PC manufacturer in the world, has skipped hybrid drives altogether so far, and has gone straight to offering notebooks with solid-state drives. HP's first notebooks with a 64GB solid-state drive will ship in the next few weeks. HP went with the solid-state technology for its shock resistance and lower power consumption, according to a company representative. Solid-state drives use flash memory--or in some cases SDRAM (synchronous dynamic random access memory) in place of hard disk drives to store data. They are significantly more expensive than traditional hard disk drives.

Seagate has also announced its intentions to look into producing solid state drives next year, but first for the enterprise market, Seagate CEO Bill Watkins said in an interview with CNET News.com last month.

Major Internet Hubs See Lesser Influence

The recent rush by major Internet portals to buy advertising companies and extend their sales networks is a sign that the business of being a one-stop shop for information and entertainment isn't what it used to be.

Gone are the days of emphasizing ways to attract and keep visitors - the way television networks long have operated - by creating destinations with anything people might need for work, leisure or companionship.

Instead, those companies are now more aggressively trying to follow Web surfers elsewhere - and bring lucrative advertising to them.

As people increasingly turn to blogs, social-networking sites and other sources of user-generated media, Google Inc. (GOOG, News), Yahoo Inc. (YHOO, News), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT, News) and Time Warner Inc.'s (TWX, News) AOL have spent more than $10 billion collectively this year to acquire companies and technologies that help extend their online advertising networks.

So instead of relying solely on being portals for consumers, the major companies are creating one-stop shops for advertisers, who are increasingly wanting to buy ads centrally and place them where the eyeballs are. The networks take care of feeding the ads to smaller sites.

"We're not interested in building yesterday's portal," said Ron Grant, AOL's president and chief operating officer. "Consumers are finding what they are looking for is coming from more and more fragmented places. We need a way for advertisers to take advantage of that fragmentation."

That shift is important for the major Internet businesses to grab a substantial share of the marketing dollars expected to flow at the expense of television and print.

For consumers, the development means greater freedom and a further erosion of artificial walls designed to keep visitors from leaving sites.

According to comScore Media Metrix, the U.S. audience for the four major Internet brands grew over the past year. But the total time spent at Yahoo and AOL dropped about 10 percent, while Microsoft's MSN-Windows Live services saw an 8 percent decline.

In other words, these sites are attracting more people but are keeping them for shorter durations as users find what they need elsewhere.

Google was the exception, with a 57 percent jump in total time spent, but even the company recognizes that "no individual property will have all those products and services" a user might want, said Tim Armstrong, Google's head of North American ad sales.

"The Internet is basically being built and scaling (faster) than any one property on the Internet is," Armstrong said. "Companies in the Internet space are changing their business models to have models which are consumer driven, not property driven."

That's not to say the major Internet destinations are ceding their own properties.

In a few cases, the large companies have bought wildly popular sites. Google spent about $1.76 billion last November to absorb the leading video-sharing site, YouTube. It also owns the blogging service Blogger, while Yahoo has the photo-sharing site Flickr.

They are also innovating. AOL revamped its video search site in August, while Yahoo retooled its core search engine this month to try to make it more engaging and lure back those who had defected to Google.

"Everyone still wants to be your home page. They are always going to battle for that," said Nick Nyhan, chief executive of market research firm Dynamic Logic. "But they have to think beyond that. Consumers aren't going to just take your stuff."

Google, Yahoo and AOL still make most of their ad money from sites they own and operate (Microsoft did not break down figures in its regulatory filings). Google and Yahoo even reported relative growth there in the second quarter.

Ad networks set the stage for the future and help the large Internet companies ensure they will have enough inventory to sell in the years ahead.

Ford Motor Co. (F, News) can, for instance, come to Google and buy ads that run not only there but also at The New York Times' Web site and thousands of others within Google's AdSense network. Ford wouldn't have to deal with all those sites individually; third-party sites wouldn't have to expand their sales team.

Meanwhile, Google gets a cut of ad revenues - without spending a dime developing those specialty sites.

Although this concept isn't new, what is changing is the scale.

In agreeing to acquire DoubleClick Inc. for $3.1 billion, Google is looking for better ways to deliver multimedia display ads to supplement the small, text-based ads the company already does well.

The still-pending acquisition also extends Google's reach beyond AdSense to all the outside sites for which DoubleClick now distributes advertising.

Likewise, in buying Tacoda Inc., AOL not only gets Tacoda's technology for targeting ads, but also extends its reach to NBC Universal, Scripps Networks and the Times (sites can join multiple ad networks). AOL also has a network through its 2004 acquisition of Advertising.com and separately bought companies this year serving international markets and wireless devices.

Yahoo, meanwhile, paid about $650 million for the 80 percent of Right Media Inc. it did not already own and agreed to buy BlueLithium Inc. for $300 million. Microsoft bought aQuantive Inc. for $6 billion.

"It's not that networks are going to supplant these mass-market sites, but they will have less influence as networks have more," said David Hallerman, a senior analyst at the research group eMarketer, which projects U.S. online advertising spending at $44 billion in 2011, more than double the $17 billion last year.

The shift didn't happen overnight. Many factors are involved, including online hangouts like Facebook and News Corp.'s (NWS, News) (NWS, News) MySpace commanding more of a user's time over the past few years. Web sites big and small are making features available, through tools called widgets, for viewing directly at those sites.

Of course, the major brands would still prefer visitors going to them directly, as they wouldn't have to share ad revenues with another site.

But as audiences disperse, advertisers have become reluctant to concentrate their spending at a traditional portal.

Besides standardization, efficiency and diversity, advertisers get better targeting with networks. Say you are trying to reach Seattle natives with a propensity to fly to the remote Arctic island of Svalbard. On a portal you might find 10. On a network 100 times larger, you'd find 1,000 without changing your campaign.

There are drawbacks, though.

U.S. and European regulators are reviewing Google's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick. Critics complain Google would have too much control over online advertising and personal information collected on users.

And despite the efficiencies, consolidation could hamper flexibility, said Jason Turner, vice president for interactive at advertising agency Ignited.

"When there were four television networks, you were beholden to those four, (who could say), `Here are the rules. This is what it's going to cost and if you don't like it you're not going to get on TV,'" Turner said.

Nonetheless, ad networks are here to stay.

"Advertisers are going to need to start to use the Internet the way people always use the Internet, spreading out in hot pursuit of the things they need and want," said Jarvis Coffin, chief executive of Burst Media Corp., an independent ad network. "It's much easier to fish where the fish are."

IBM Unveils BladeCenter System Built For SMBs

IBM(IBM) on Thursday unveiled a BladeCenter S system built to operate a small business from a single piece of desk-side hardware.

The latest addition to the BladeCenter S product line is right-sized to sit in an office environment and plug into a standard 110-vote power outlet. The system includes storage and up to six blade servers to handle computing needs ranging from servers to phone systems and antivirus applications, IBM said.

The new system is a competitor to Hewlett-Packard(HP)'s c3000 BladeSystem, dubbed "Shorty," which was unveiled last month. Similar to IBM's BladeCenter, the c3000 also plugs into a wall socket and is available with integrated storage. It can come prepackaged with business applications from Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and others.

IBM and HP have each focused on simplicity of deployment and management for their respective systems. IBM claims its 60-decibel system is 10 decibels quieter than the c3000, and has room in the chassis for adding components like storage libraries or power supplies. The IBM system also includes an automated, three-step setup tool for storage.

IBM introduced the BladeCenter S in June as a blade computing system designed for smaller firms. The latest version of the product, however, was built especially for businesses operating branch offices, such as retailers or financial institutions.

"With its ability to fit into an office as well as its ease of use and installation, this is not a blade system turned on its side or chopped in half to just look like a small business solution," Alex Yost, VP of IBM BladeCenter, said in a statement.

Pricing for the new BladeCenter S, scheduled to ship in December, starts at $3,298, which includes power supplies, fans, rack rails and DVD bay. Pricing for the c3000 starts at $4,299.

Besides HP and IBM, Dell also has been focusing on simplifying its sever and storage products. The computer maker last month launched under its "simplifying IT" initiative a storage area network array called the PowerVault MD3000i, which targets small and mid-size companies.

Offering storage and servers in a single system like HP's and IBM's is meant to simplify SMBs' computing environments. Convergence was the motive behind Sun Microsystems(SUNW)' announcement this week that it would combine its storage and server teams into a systems group focused on the mixing of computing, storage and networking.