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[Photo: Reinhard Hunger for Fast Company]
Google I/O Keynote
On May 28, 2015 at 9:30 a.m. PT / 12:30 p.m. ET, Google will hold the keynote at its I/O developer conference in San Francisco. Expect news on all of its platforms: the web, Android, Chrome, and more. Fast Company's Harry McCracken, John Brownlee, and Jared Newman will be there to cover it in person and will share developments as they happen.
Did you miss the event? You can watch the keynote video here and read a quick recap of they keynote's highlights here.
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Google Photos will be available today on Android, web, and iOS.
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@HarryMcCracken: That's an important point. Flickr doesn't limit quality this way.
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Also, another thing Flickr allows is for you to redownload all your images if you don't want to store them in the cloud, in a massive zip file. Doesn't look like Google wants you taking your photos out?
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Seems like Photos could be the biggest real-world, not pie-in-the-sky news of the day.
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Google Photos stores photos up to 16mb, and videos up to 1080p all for free.
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"Go to Jakarta and you'll see a huge number of devices on display, but not all of these phones can run the latest and greatest of apps." This woman literally just did a real life crying face emoji when she said that. (Sorry, missed her name: anyone know who this is?)
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Chromebooks just name-checked. 10,000s of thousands activated a day. Maybe no actual Chromebook news, though.
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Surprisingly casual mention of 10 million Chromebooks in education
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Just got a heartwarming story about a farmer who searched Google for a tip on improving his crops with wood ash. Felt like a response to criticism of Google (and Facebook) for worrying about connectivity for people who have other pressing needs besides online access.
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Google's taking a page out of Opera's book, by optimizing and compressing web pages for Chrome users in emerging markets.
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"Where users are often on slow connections." Like the United States? I kid, but we really are quite far behind much of the rest of the world on connection speeds.
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Google's taking its optimizations for low-power devices -- 4x faster, 80 percent fewer bytes, 80 MB reduction in memory use -- to devices across the board.
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Doing better vs. the rest of the world in the LTE era than we did previously, though.
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Saving pages for offline viewing coming to Chrome. Polite applause.
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Hijab scarf YouTube tutorials being mentioned. You can watch them offline now.
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Most of the people in this room are developers, and they're hear to learn of new ways to make money. Can't quite tell if they're interested in this emerging-world news, or have written off entire countries as being unlikely to be monetizable.
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Offline Google Maps with turn-by-turn voice direction. That's pretty rad, even in America.
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Something not everyone may realize: A phone can update your GPS location even when it's not connected to a cellular network. That's how Google can do offline turn-by-turn directions.
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Having been lost in the desert in New Mexico at night last summer, I'm kind of excited about this offline maps feature.
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No mention of Google+ so far. I'll bet that when Google launched G+, it envisioned future I/O keynotes being crammed with news about it.
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(And if you had no idea Google Maps could go offline in the first place, here's how:)
Download an offline map - Maps for mobile Help
If you're going where mobile data is expensive or you won't have an Internet connection, you can save a map to your device and use it when you're offline. Here’s how: Make sure you're connected -
Keynote is finally turning to stuff involving making money. It's interesting to see Google frontload news about stuff like Google Photos, which won't help third parties make money--and might even hurt them if they offer something it competes with.
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We've entered the part of the keynote in which developers cheer loudly over things that journos are scratching their heads about.
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Google is releasing Cloud Test Lab, a platform for app developers which gives a free report on how an app runs on the top 20- devices in the world. Sounds good, but honestly, with thousands of devices in the wild, top 20 Android devices isn't going to help developers deal with Android's fragmentation problems.
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Titus said Cloud Test Lab is coming "soon." Ironic laughter from audience.
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Google Cloud Messaging sends 70 billion messages a day, across 600,000 apps. It's coming to iOS.
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App developers will be able to see how many people looked at their app listing in Google Play, which will help them determine how good they are at turning browsers into downloaders. The store will also enable A/B testing.
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And developers will be able to create a Google Play homepage for their entire collection of apps.
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If you're just at I/O to look for cool, consumery stuff, this section of the keynote is dry. But for developers, it's really important, especially since Android has a history of underperforming iOS in terms of being a way to build a business.
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Here are some reasons why Android app development has lagged behind iOS when it comes to monetization, from an app dev who abandoned Android development.
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So, Google, the number of active Google Androids users hasn't increase at all in the last? Still '1bn'?by BenedictEvans via twitter 5/28/2015 6:22:22 PM -
I’d tweet that Google has X more number of women on stage relative to Apple, but you can’t multiply by 0.by monkbent via twitter 5/28/2015 6:23:03 PM -
Google is announcing changes to Google Play to make it easier to find family-related stuff. There's a "Family Star" icon which highlights family-friendly apps. Sort of a G rating, I guess.
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You can now browse Google Play by character. Good news for kids. Bad news for their parents?
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Google is working with Udacity to offer a "nanodegree" in Android development.
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Sundar Pichai back on stage, and it sounds like we're going to hear about VR.
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Okay, now things are getting interesting. Sindar is now talking about the future of computing, and it sounds like he's about to announce the relaunch of Glass.
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Nope, Jared's right, this is all about VR and Google Cardboard 2.0.
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Udacity's Android Nanodegree joins the iOS Nanodegree, which has been around awhile. And Udacity is run by Sebastian Thrun, formerly the head of Google's self-driving car program.
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Clay Bavor, Vice President of Product Management justcame on stage.
