Today, a day after discussing his voice issues, Google CEO Larry Page took the stage at I/O keynote. He skipped last year’s conference and a few earnings calls after it due to those same voice problems, which he has noted are improving. Page even did something a little new for I/O — taking questions at the end of his talk.

At I/O, Page discussed how important it is for both the developers and Google itself to keep dedicating themselves to technology, to make sure that people everywhere can get access to it. He also discussed his relationship with his father, and how important that was in influencing him when it comes to innovation:

My dad was really interested in technology. He drove me and my family all across the country to go to a robotis company. Then we got there, he thought it was so important his son would go to the conference.

He moved on to discuss how important it is to be able to put all of its work on every single device, making Google a platform to build from. Page notes that adoption of technology is now “much, much faster” and the smartphone itself shows that. Page wants technology to do the hard work, meaning that consumers should be able to use technology, not be used by it. Google’s latest design choices and product announcements reflect that line of thinking, specifically the ease of use that comes with Google Now.

His philosophy can be best summed up with this quote: “We should be building great things that don’t exist.” This is why Google doesn’t pay attention to competition who is working on similar products, it tries to stay one step ahead with things like self-driving cars and Glass.

Page being on stage is a big deal, as it shows that the company is unified under his direction, regardless of his medical condition.

When asked about freedom of information, Page said that in hundreds of countries in the world, Google is speaking to leaders of countries, specifically its Chairman, Eric Schmidt, to keep dialogue open about protecting users’ privacy as well as keeping your freedom of speech intact.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

At its I/O developer conference, Google just announced its new Play Games Services API, a new API that allows game developers to save game states and sync them between different machines. This service will be available for Android and iOS developers. The API will also include the usual achievements, leaderboards and multiplayer services that developers have come to expect from similar services.

This new API will roll out today to all Android users on Android Froyo and up. This new API, Google says, will allow for real cross-platform gaming experiences and ensure that users can easily switch between their phones and tablets without losing their game states.

The multiplayer aspect of the service will feature both a matchmaking aspect, but the focus is clearly on connecting you to your Google+ friends. The matchmaking feature, as Google’s Huga Barra noted, will match users automatically and the API in general will handle “all of the hardcore data” worked involved in building a multiplayer game.

Sadly, part of the demo failed at the keynote today, but this is obviously a service that game developers will latch on to. This move also clearly means that Google is getting serious about gaming.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

When we we last talked to augmented reality startup Dekko, back in September of last year, the company was building a platform on which it hoped to find developers to build a new generation of applications that blend computing with the real world. And, while it still hopes to be that platform, which it’s calling a ‘real-world operating system,’ the company is focusing its efforts on creating its own applications, in an effort to attract users and developers alike.

The startup has built technology which can be used to map the real world using a mobile phone or tablet’s camera. It does that by building digital grids through 3-D mapping. Once that is done, Dekko (and other developers) can layer games and other applications on top of it. For now, its app is focused on creating a grid of small, independent spaces. But there’s the potential for it to be used to map full-scale real-world environments as well.

Dekko co-founder Matt Miesnieks likened the company’s initial platform approach to selling shovels during a gold rush. That strategy, though, wasn’t going to help create the best applications on its whole new “real-world OS,” and so the company decided to take up shovels itself and dig in to create its own apps. And so it’s building its first game — which Miesnieks says is about 90 percent done — to showcase what developers can actually DO with its platform.

In that respect, the app that it’s building is kind of like how Microsoft built Solitaire for its Windows platform, Miesnieks said. More than just providing a free game for users of the new operating system, it also trained them how to use a mouse and to familiarize themselves with the control mechanism.

Dekko has also raised a bit more funding, adding an additional $1.3 million to close out a $3.2 million round. Investors include Echo Ventures, Bessemer Venture Partners, Venture 51, Blumberg Capital, Launch Capital, Thomvest, Eniac Ventures, and Zig Capital, as well as angels like Howard Lindzon, Erik Moore, Dan Conway, and Raymond Tonsing. The company, which is based in San Francisco, now has ten employees with expertise in augmented reality, optical tracking, 3D reconstruction and user experience design.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

This is a fascinating little blip that popped up this morning and bears a mention. Games company GreenHeart released a $8 game called Game Dev Tycoon. He sold a few hundred copies and, as a special treat, released a torrent of the game with a special feature built-in: after hours of play, the little virtual game devs would get a sales report that said pirates were stealing the game so much that the company was going under. Hilarity ensued.

Gamers with the pirated version resorted to complaining about the product on various forums, wondering why their choice to pirate a $10 game was coming back to bite them. To wit:

Sadly, all of this irony still didn’t make GreenHeart games much money as over 90% of the users downloaded the pirated version and the creator made $2,140 as of yesterday. Hopefully all of this attention is getting creator Patrick Klug a little more cash but it’s a sad situation when an industry that lionizes the indie refuses to pay for the products they champion. Information wants to be free, to be sure, but Krug needs to eat.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last week, Google finally released the developer guides and other necessary documents that will allow developers to write apps for Glass. In some respects, the so-called Mirror API may have been a disappointment to developers who were expecting to run full-blown augmented-reality apps, but even in its current form, it will allow developers to create new experiences for their new and existing apps that just weren’t possible before.

One thing many developers may not have realized before Google published these documents is that the API is essentially an old-school RESTful service. The only way to interact with Glass is through the cloud. The only apps you can build – at least for now – are web-based, and despite the fact that Glass runs Android, you can’t run any services directly on the hardware.

Google may have made this choice for a number of reasons. It ensures that Glass’ battery life is reasonable (Google says it should last a full day, assuming you don’t record a lot of video), but this also means that if a service goes haywire and sends out a fresh cat picture to users every second, it can intervene and cut that service’s access off. Depending on how you look at this, that’s either a good or a bad thing, but Google is clearly interested in keeping some control over what’s happening on Glass for now.

The way the API works, however, also means there are things you can’t quite do with Glass yet that are possible on any modern smartphone. You can’t write a real augmented-reality app, for example. It also doesn’t look as if you could easily stream audio or video from the device to your own services (though you can obviously use Hangouts on Glass).

Because the platform is essentially web-based, you are also limited to HTML and CSS when it comes to styling your apps, and Google would prefer it if you didn’t write any custom CSS and just stuck with its own templates.

For the most part, though, developers will be able to approximate the experience Google shared in its first Glass demo video last year.

Assuming you have an Android phone, you will be able to create location-enabled apps. Users can send images to your service (so you could build a service that manipulates or analyzes these images in the cloud and then sends the results back to the user) and upload videos, too (and in return, you can also send audio, video and photos to the user).

What developers aren’t allowed to do (yet?), however, is to display advertising onto a user’s Glass screen or to sell their apps (unlawful gambling apps are also out of the question). Given the current size of the market for Glass apps, that’s not a huge issue. I expect that Google will allow developers to sell access to their apps in the future, but traditional ads just don’t make sense on this platform.

Google stresses that Glass is still a very new platform and that developers should keep this in mind when they write applications for it. That’s also why only developers who own the actual hardware can currently get API access.

For the time being then, developers will likely remain somewhat underwhelmed by the API. It’s worth remembering, however, that this is just a first release. Google could open the hardware up to more sophisticated apps in the future and/or enable access to more features through the current API. Without native apps, Glass won’t be able to do many things developers may have envisioned for it, but even with these limitations, I’m sure we’ll see a fair amount of innovative Glassware in the near future.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Xamarin, the company behind the cross-platform mobile development platform with the same name, today announced that it has recently acquired the Danish mobile testing startup LessPainful. LessPainful is the company behind the popular open source cross-platform functional test platform for Android and iOS, and Xamarin has already put this acquisition to use. The Xamarin Test Cloud, the automated user interface testing platform the company launched at its Evolve 2013 developer conference in Austin today, is based on Calabash.

Test Cloud is a pretty ingenious product that solves a real problem for mobile developers. It allows users to easily write user interface tests and then see how their apps perform on real-world devices. Indeed, LessPainful – and now Xamarin – operate a lab with hundreds of devices, and the service runs these tests directly on the device and provides users with detailed logs and screenshots about how the app performed.

As Xamarin co-founder and CEO Nat Friedman told me last week, fewer than 10 percent of developers currently use automated user interface testing for their apps. The tools that are currently on the market, he noted, tend to be hard to set up and use – and once they run, the tests are often very fragile because they rely on image recognition, so even the slightest change to the wording on a button can throw them off. Developers, however, should really run these tests, given the huge fragmentation in the mobile space (and especially on Android). They only get a short amount of time to convince users that their apps are worth using, and the smoother the experience, the more time the user will spend with the app.

Test Cloud – and Calabash – takes a different approach. It provides users with a very basic language to write tests and a great user interface for running the tests and seeing the logs. Developers can choose which phones to test their apps on or just choose to run their apps on the top 10, 20 or 30 phones on the market.

As Friedman noted, one of the nifty features of Test Cloud is that users don’t even have to write a test to get some early results (he called it a “gateway drug” in our interview). The Xamarin App Explorer will automatically navigate through your app and visit every screen, press every button and try every UI element. All of the user interface elements are identified by object IDs and not image recognition or gesture recording, so as long as the ID remains the same, developers and designers can change the color of the layout of their apps at will and the tests will still work.

Because it can be integrated into popular continuous integration systems like Team Foundation Server, Jenkins and TeamCity (Xamarin offers plugins for those), as well as an API and command-line interface, it’s easy for developers to regularly test their apps.

Xamarin, Friedman told me, is growing rapidly. The company has over 15,000 paying customers and in total, over 300,000 developers are now using the service. Some of the company’s most well-known customers include Rdio, Clear Channel, the Portland Trailblazers and National Instruments. The launch of Xamarin 2.0, which allows developers to use Visual Studio to write iOS apps, has been a major factor in the recent interest in the company’s tools.

Access to the Test Cloud is currently only available by invite. During the beta phase, the service will be available for free to Xamarin users. After the beta ends later this year, the pricing will be based on device hours, but the company is still working out the details.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook Home is due out today and will likely arrive soon, but the standalone Messenger app update is already here, and it brings Chat Heads support to most Android devices, regardless of whether or not you have Home installed. That means that when you’re using other apps or on the home screen, Messenger messages will pop up with the Chat Head icon of the person messaging you, allowing you to quickly jump into a conversation without leaving your current app.

You can also dismiss the conversation by swiping down from a Chat Heads message. I’ve been testing the feature and it works well out of the gate, displaying multiple incoming conversations and letting you switch between them, overtop of any other Android apps you may be using. The feature is a killer one, no doubt, and makes Messenger a lot more of a threat to other messaging apps out there, by placing your messages where they’re actually useful to you.

It’s a little like having Growl notifications on your Android device, but more useful since it actually doesn’t require you to switch apps to engage with the ongoing conversations. The only downside I can see is that if you get a lot of FB messages, you may feel a tad overwhelmed while trying to keep up, and it’s definitely a visual and auditory distraction. Luckily, you can disable Chat Heads in Messenger at any time from the app’s Settings menu.

While some users may be reluctant to turn over their entire phone to Android, this added functionality in Chat Heads is useful for pretty much anyone who uses FB Messenger, and could provide impetus to convince others to switch away from competing services. I have to wonder how other developers will feel about Facebook interrupting their experience with customers within their own apps.

It doesn’t appear as though Chat Heads in the standalone Messenger app pulls in your text messages too, based on our tests. Still, it’s already turning out to be pretty addictive in just a short time using it. Update: Turns out you can have Messenger field your text messages, too. You just need to enable it in Settings under “SMS/MMS.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

With the relative decline of Plancast and Upcoming, the Lanyrd startup has solidly stepped in to the breach, aggregating content around speakers, attendees, venues, books, video and anything to do with conferences. It’s also benefitted from the shutdown of the LinkedIn Events application. Now all it has to do is work out a business model. Well, today it does the big reveal on that, announcing the launch of Lanyrd Pro, a new paid-for premium product that lets companies track all their staff appearances at events and conferences.

Lanyrd Pro starts at $99 a month with a 10% discount if purchased annually. Pricing varies with the size of the team. Launch customers include Facebook, GitHub and Heroku, which spend plenty on sponsoring events and sending speakers.

Companies can spend a lot of time and money sending speakers to and sponsoring professional events but much of this activity is wasted if it’s not coordinated or promoted. So now Lanyrd has created special tools for companies to track all this activity and also promote it.

Managers can track their teams via an updating calendar of every event their speakers are attending or have attended in the past. Slides and videos from the talks are held in a central place, and private notes allow speakers or managers to provide feedback on events while private labels can be used to manage sponsorship deal-flow.

Marketers can also create a branded event portal highlighting the company’s speakers, events, slides and videos which is spread across Lanyrd’s event listings, session pages, speaker profiles and mobile apps .

Simon Willison, CEO at Lanyrd, says the new feature has the potential to save companies thousands of dollars a year by stopping clashes and coordinating efforts better.

Delyn Simons, VP of Developer Platform at Mashery, says: “Keeping our community of 200,000 developers informed of the 60-plus hack events Mashery sponsors and attends each year is key to helping them and other developers innovate apps with the latest and greatest APIs.”

And guess what? You can now track TechCrunch’s editors and writers as they criss-cross the globe at tech startup conferences here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Backlift, a Y Combinator-backed startup that’s launching today, describes itself as a back-end service for front-end developers. The service takes all of the work of setting up a server environment out of the equation and just lets front-end developers focus on their work. All a user needs is a Dropbox account – Backlift uses Dropbox as a file syncing service – and a text editor. With Backlift, a developer doesn’t need to know how to set up Rails, Django or node.js to get started.

As Backlift founder Cole Krumbholz told me last week, the idea behind the service is to allow developers to jump right into working on their front-end code. For many people, he said, front-end tools can be a bit daunting and he wants Backlift to be a great learning tool, but he also aims to make it a platform for prototyping and, soon, a platform for hosting applications.

To get started, users simply sign in with their Dropbox account, create a new app from based on a number of templates, including numerous backbone.js sample apps, a Google Maps API-based site, and basic Bootstrap-based sites. You can also use other popular technologies like AngularJS, CoffeeScript and Handlebars. Backlift then creates a new folder in your Dropbox account (and hence on your desktop, too) and you can start editing it with your favorite text editor. Every time you save an edit, Dropbox will sync with Backlift and you can immediately see the changes on your site (syncing starts less than a second after your changes are uploaded to Dropbox).

Given that most applications need to work with at least some data, Backlift also offers a basic API for working with data, as well as an admin dashboard for adding users and browsing, importing and exporting the data in your database.

One of the companies that has been using Backlift extensively during the beta phase is Automatic.com – the YC-backed company that recently launched its hardware for turning any car into a connected car. “We have our own Amazon S3 servers, however Backlift is a much easier, faster, and secure way of working on the site as we got it ready for launch and showed investors,” Automatic.com’s visual and interactive designer Gabriel Valdivia told me.

The service, Krumbholz told me, will evolve constantly and the team plans to launch quite a few new features in the near future – though he wasn’t quite ready to share the team’s plans just yet.

For now, Backlift is completely free to use. The team will likely add some premium features, though the details are still up in the air.

Krumbholz, by the way, is one of the few solo founders who have made it into Y Combinator. After he left the Navy, he previously worked on air traffic control interfaces and then started making mobile games for iOS.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Cisimple a startup that helps automate the build, testing and deployment process for mobile applications, is today exiting its beta and making its new testing platform available to all developers. The company is also the first to integrate with Kickfolio’s API, another newly launched startup which brings iOS applications to the browser using HTML5.

The Continuous Integration space is starting to heat up as of late, following CircleCI (the “Heroku for testing”)’s $1.5 million seed funding from Heroku’s founders and Eric Ries earlier this year. But where Cisimple hopes to differentiate itself from other players on the market, which to some extent include Atlassian Bamboo, CloudBees (for Java), and Travis CI, to name a few, is to specifically focus on mobile. (That’s the promise HostedCi offers as well, but the company seems to be stuck in beta.)

After sign up, Cisimple integrates with GitHub, scanning a developer’s repository for mobile applications. As developers write and update their code, the system can automatically build apps, run tests and then deploy apps to users through services like TestFlight, and new partner, HockeyApp, which added Cisimple integration just weeks ago.

The AngelPad-backed startup first opened its doors to mobile developers this November, and had around 1,100 early adopters trying out the service. “Once live, we got a lot of feedback from users, and learned about what the pain points are for mobile developers, and what we’re well positioned to help with,” explains CEO Kevin Rohling. “One of those areas is testing – it’s really difficult right now. And doing it in an automated fashion for mobile developers, it basically didn’t exist….Well, it didn’t exist,” he adds.

On Cisimple’s infrastructure, the company can spin up simulations of a range of devices, then build, test and deploy their apps. Both iOS and Android are currently supported, but testing is limited to iOS only for now. Though Android is where more fragmentation lies in terms of form factors and OS/SDK versions, Rohling says the company is actually seeing more demand for iOS right now, which is why Android is on the back burner as the company gets off the ground.

On the testing platform, Cisimple does more than offer developers a log and pass/fail results, but can actually do interesting things like capturing video of the tests running on the simulators. “It’s another level of detail that developers who oftentimes set these things up themselves don’t get,” Rohling notes. “We try to make it easy as possible to get feedback about their applications – what’s changing, what’s breaking – and then very easily find those things, too. What we’re really doing is making mobile development more of an agile process, whereas today it’s typically disjointed and difficult,” he says.

The Kickfolio integration is notable as well, as it allows developers to view the code for any build right in the browser. That means if a test fails, not only are you getting the results of that fail, you can actually launch the exact build, click around and reproduce the bug yourself. (You can view a few of Cismple’s customers here, and click around yourself in their Kickfolio-powered apps. Kickfolio is available to all paid users of the Cisimple service.)

Rohling declined to provide details as to beta traction metrics  saying it’s too early to comment, but he did says that several of the early testers have converted to paid plans now, primarily towards the indie side of the tiered pricing scale.

Developers signing up today can participate in a free two-week trial, or use a basic version of Cisimple supporting up to 30 builds per month without having to pay. Plans start at $19/month for indie developers, $99/month startups, and $999/month for large organizations. Sign up is here.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch