Google’s annual developer’s conference kicked-off yesterday with some fairly big announcements from the Moscone West Convention Center in San Francisco, California. As 5,000 web, mobile, and enterprise developers packed in for the two-day event, Google provided the “State of Android” speech that everyone was expecting.
With over 100 million Android devices already activated and roughly 400,000 new ones registered each day, Google’s mobile OS is truly making some huge strides against their nearest competitor, Apple. In the app department, Google does not disappoint, with 200,000 apps available via Google’s Market as well as Amazon’s new Appstore for Android.
The biggest announcements from Day 1 of I/O seemingly patched up Google’s strategy for media sales and consumption on Android-powered devices, a substantial vulnerability for the Android platform when compared to Apple’s robust iTunes. ‘Music Beta by Google‘ was announced as an invite-only beta service, offering cloud-based storage for up to 20,000 user-uploaded tracks, quite a bump over Amazon’s similar Cloud Drive service, which offers 5GB of storage for streaming.
Google Music launched with nary a single record label on board, so users will not be able to purchase tracks directly. ‘Google Movies,’ available via the Android Market, sounds a bit more ready for prime-time.
Continue Reading →
