The most anticipated Google I/O developer conference has kicked off in San Francisco with lots of announcements, new products, features and updates for both consumers and developers. Google is expected to announce what users and developers should expect for the next 12 months of it’s product innovation and development. Google’s I/O event is taking place in San Francisco’s Moscone Center from June 27th – 29th, 2012.
Google has already made significant announcements and these are a few you should know.
# Interestingly Google TV (The web and app goodness of Google TV is built right into your TV set, so you just need to plug in your existing cable (or satellite) receiver as usual) website was get refreshed and updated ahead of Google I/O. Watch out for Google TV. Updates coming soon.
# Google Nexus Q (social streaming music player). Nexus Q lets you stream music and movies from Google Play and YouTube to your home entertainment system. It offers a 25W amp, enabling you to power it to a set of speakers, or you can hook it up to an AV receiver or HDTV. The Nexus Q will be available for $300.
# Google Nexus 7 (Google’s answer to Apple’s iPad and the Kindle Fire). The Nexus 7 will be available for pre-order beginning now starting at $199 for the 8GB version, and $250 for the 16GB version, and should begin shipping in mid-July in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia with more countries to come. Google is is offering customers a $25 credit to spend on Play store content, along with additional content, including a copy of Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
# Google has revamped their mobile search experience. Searching from the Google bar brings up handsome white cards that display information culled using the Knowledge Graph. Also on deck is improved voice search.
# Google Now “gets to the right information at the right time… automatically” by looking at your “search history, your calendar, and more to figure out what you might want.
# Google’s Hugo Barra has pulled the curtains back on the latest version of Google’s mobile operating system: Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.
# Google Play media and app store- Google announced it now has more than 600,000 apps, over 1.5B app installs per moth, and over 20 billion app installs total. For magazines in Play, Google announced “we’ve gone beyond just replicating print.” Now you can browse through magazines, swipe between pages at the bottom and there’s also a pure-text view for uncluttered reading and interactive features that might include video or game insets.
# Google+ : Current numbers:
– 250M+ accounts have upgraded to or signed up for a Google+ account
– 150M+ accounts are active every month
– 50% of its users sign in every day
– On average, 12 minutes a day are spent in the Google+ stream
– Google+ now has a tablet version (The Android version is available immediately and the iPad version has been submitted for review)
# Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google unveils Google glasses. Google will begin taking orders from software developers for Google glasses for $1,500 each. Google glasses will begin shipping to developers next year, he said. During the demonstration, the Google glasses team said the company has two goals for the glasses: Communicating with images and then giving people access to information. And possibly a third: the ability to do both without having to pull out a phone from your pocket.