Wearables, bigger ecosystem for Android

Google are having a proper go at their competitors, currently there is the Google I/O developers conference on the go at a place called the Moscone Center, a 65 thousand square meter centre in San Francisco. Day 2 of the conference ended yesterday. If you want to watch the Google I/O 2014 - Keynote, of course you can do so on YouTube.


There is a fellow by the name of Sundar Pichai, who is the senior VP for Android, Chrome and Applications, delivering the keynote speech. Pichai was born in India, in Chennai for all you MS Dhoni fans out there, has been at Google for over ten years which is a lifetime at a relatively new company like that, I guess. Google is only 15 years old, turning 16 in September. So if you have been there for this long, you can call yourself there at the beginning.


Enough about the personalities at Google, you know them well. What Google announced in a nutshell is a smart watch, Android TV and Android Auto, taking the existing Android software and expanding it across to other devices that we know well. Cars, watches and TV's. Google through their fragmented hardware market running Android software has the biggest ecosystem, it makes sense that there is a standard for all of the hardware manufacturers to be able to run later versions of the software. And the launch of Android One, a cheaper smartphone (around 100 Dollars) with the first place to be launched in India. Eric Schmidt, the chairman of Google took to Twitter and had this to say:

Particularly excited about Android One, launching first in #India. Affordable smartphone technology for the next billion. #io14

— Eric Schmidt (@ericschmidt) June 26, 2014

There are some interesting notes to emerge from the conference, one being that Android users check their phones around 150 times a day. Or, in a 14 hour day that the handset is with you, around once every 5 minutes and 36 seconds. Wow. For what? Does it matter, you are missing out if you do not check your handset, right? Yes!! Fear of Missing Out, or FOMO is real.


All you need to know about Google is that in time, and perhaps sooner rather than later, they will start to monetise other platforms of theirs, with the initial intention to connect the world. That of course is not too different to Facebook, coincidently, the whole idea of connecting everyone. I suspect that with more connectivity society will get back to self inflection and making sure that we police ourselves, in a similar sort of way that Wikipedia does, the community keeps the outliers in check. The exact opposite of a few bad apples spoiling the crop.