Google Introduces Chromecast For Your TV

Chromecast

TV boxes are nothing new, with companies like Rokku, TiVo, Apple and even Google itself competing with their own TV boxes, attempting to connect your large screen TV to the Internet. In the case of Google TV, it was not a huge success and we haven't seen much updates lately. But today, the company introduced a brand new device which may just make Google TV, and all previous TV boxes, obsolete. Chromecast is a tiny $35 stick which can be plugged into the back of your large screen and broadcast Internet content for you. It uses technology different from previous products, and that may be key to its success.

Most boxes like the Apple TV allow you to stream content from one device to the next. For example, if you have a tablet and watch a movie, then want to send that movie to your large screen TV, the iPad can use AirPlay to stream the content from the portable device to the Apple TV directly. But Chromecast doesn't work like that. Instead, you simply send a command from your tablet, phone, PC or other device to the Chromecast telling it to fetch the media directly from the Internet. That means you're not just mirroring your phone on your TV, you're fetching the high quality media directly from the web.

This distinction allows a couple of nice features. First, unlike previous TV boxes which were restricted on which devices can control them, the Chromecast can accept commands from any Chrome browser. That means as long as it runs Chrome, any device can control your Chromecast, from a PC to an Android phone or an iPad. Then, you also aren't limited in the selection of content. Not only can you stream Netflix or YouTube on Chromecast, but you can also display any Chrome tab on it, meaning that you can view any web page, image or video from the Internet. And at $35, the price is quite attractive, since this is in essence nothing more than a small hardware key, which you then control from your other device. Both Google and Amazon started selling the device right after the announcement, and as of now, they are both out of stock.

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Google Nexus 7.2 LTE will come to the UK priced at £299

INTERNET GIANT Google has confirmed that its Nexus 7.2 LTE model will be released in the UK, despite speculation that the tablet would be available in the US only.

It may have taken almost 24 hours to get the information out of Google, but the firm has finally confirmed that the 4G version of its latest Nexus 7 tablet will see a release in the UK, telling us that it will start shipping in "the coming weeks" priced at £299.

We're guessing that this means that UK mobile operator EE will be offering the tablet, but the mobile network told The INQUIRER that it has nothing to announce yet. No other mobile operators have announced that they will be selling the second generation Nexus 7 tablet yet either.

The Google Nexus 7.2 was unveiled on Wednesday, as the firm's second generation budget Asus built tablet. While it's just as cheap as the original, it features upgraded specifications, including a 7in 1920x1200 HD screen, a quad-core 1.5GHz processor and Google's newly announced Android 4.3 Jelly Bean operating system. There are also 5MP and 1.2MP cameras, an improvement on the original which featured just a front-facing sensor.

While the LTE version, only available in a 32GB capacity model, is priced at £299, the non-4G models are cheaper. PC World has already started taking preorders, with the 16GB model priced at £199, and the 32GB model priced at £229. According to the retailer, the tablet will start shipping on 13 September.

Google said that the Nexus 7 2 will also be available to buy from Google Play, Amazon, Argos, Asda, Currys, Carphone Warehouse, Ebuyer, John Lewis, PC World, Shop Direct, Sainsbury's and Tesco. 

Google's $35 Chromecast: What's Not to Love?

Google pulled off a rare feat this week, shocking the tech world with a product so unexpected and at such a low price that many of us were left scrambling to make sense of it.

Here's my take on the search giant's new Chromecast dongle after taking it for a quick spin at Wednesday's media event in San Francisco—go out and buy one. Preferably in the near future, because for a limited time, Google is throwing in three months of free streaming Netflix content when you buy the $35 device.

That price. What's not to love about it? As Gizmodo's Brian Barrett pointed out, the actual price for what he calls "the future of television" is around $11 when you factor in the free Netflix service.

The Chromecast works with any Android or iOS device, which function as remote controls directing the little device to pull video from the cloud and play it on your TV. You can also control the Chromecast with your PC or Mac, making this a truly cross-platform play for Google—and a shot across the bow aimed at Apple TV and Apple's AirPlay, which doesn't work with Android or Windows.

Google's $35 Chromecast: What's Not to Love?

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Basically, if you've got an HDTV, a Wi-Fi connection, and a smartphone or laptop, there's simply not a whole lot of reasons for not buying Chromecast. Unless you're literally down to your last $35 or something.

Is it going to revolutionize how we watch TV? Who knows. Lots of people are already using similar, more expensive devices from the likes of Apple and Roku $99.99 at RadioShack to stream content to their television sets. Ditto with the current and future generation of major game consoles, which are becoming all-in-one entertainment portals rather than just video game vehicles. Chromecast isn't doing anything spectacularly new, but that low, low price could sway millions of fence-sitters into giving cloud-streamed TV content a try.

Having seen the Chromecast in action this week, I'm not totally sold on it becoming the dominant platform for my TV viewing. I'm not quite ready to forego the live cable content that's piped to my box for egregious monthly prices.

But I enjoy Roku and use the Xbox 360 for non-gaming purposes more than I thought I ever would. I even got a brief kick out Google's disastrously received Nexus Q, a goofy black ball that didn't do much beyond play YouTube videos, cost hundreds of dollars, and mainly functioned as a high-tech lava lamp. A $35 dongle that gives you access to Netflix, YouTube, Google Play Store content, and the entire Internet via the Chrome browser (the last feature is in beta, but it works quite well)? That seems like a no-brainer purchase.

Speaking of the Nexus Q, it's a pretty good showing by Google to have taken its lumps on that device, returned to the drawing board, and come up with essentially a 180-degree take on streaming TV. The Nexus Q was a ridiculously expensive piece of hardware that only worked with Android and delivered extremely limited content. The Chromecast is a ridiculously cheap device that works across multiple platforms and with Netflix on board, already presents a far more attractive content offering.

Google has also released the Google Cast software developer kit, and companies like Pandora are lining up to build compatible apps for the Chromecast, which could very well build up a robust developer ecosystem in no time at all. Spotting a Google Glass wearer at Wednesday's event, I asked a Google rep if we'd be seeing a Chromecast-Glass connection anytime soon. He wouldn't say, but did mention that the SDKs for both are out there, so you do the math.

Is there anything not to like about the Chromecast? As Barrett noted, it won't charge when plugged into the HDMI port of your HDTV. You have to do that separately, which is kind of a drag. Apps are currently limited, though that should change. And you can't actually play media stored locally on your phone, tablet, or laptop—those devices just tell the Chromecast what to pull from the cloud to play rather than pushing media over to the device. But you can actually power down your phone after directing the Chromecast to do its thing.

But these are minor quibbles when you consider the crazy low price. Did I mention the Chromecast costs $35?

We will have a full review of the device in the coming days, so stay tuned. Until then, check out our first-look slideshow above.

On GPAs and Brainteasers: New Insights From Google On Recruiting and Hiring

“We found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.”

That was just one of the many fascinating revelations that Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president for people operations, shared with me in an interview that was part of the New York Times’ special section on Big Data published Thursday.

Bock’s insights are particularly valuable because Google focuses its data-centric approach internally, not just on the outside world. It collects and analyzes a tremendous amount of information from employees (people generally participate anonymously or confidentially), and often tackles big questions such as, “What are the qualities of an effective manager?” That was question at the core of its Project Oxygen.

I asked Bock in our recent conversation about other revelations about leadership and management that had emerged from its research.

The full interview is definitely worth your time, but here are some of the highlights:

The ability to hire well is random. “Years ago, we did a study to determine whether anyone at Google is particularly good at hiring,” Bock said. “We looked at tens of thousands of interviews, and everyone who had done the interviews and what they scored the candidate, and how that person ultimately performed in their job. We found zero relationship. It’s a complete random mess, except for one guy who was highly predictive because he only interviewed people for a very specialized area, where he happened to be the world’s leading expert.”

Forget brain-teasers. Focus on behavioral questions in interviews, rather than hypotheticals. Bock said it’s better to use questions like, “Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.” He added: “The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable ‘meta’ information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult.”

Consistency matters for leaders. “It’s important that people know you are consistent and fair in how you think about making decisions and that there’s an element of predictability. If a leader is consistent, people on their teams experience tremendous freedom, because then they know that within certain parameters, they can do whatever they want. If your manager is all over the place, you’re never going to know what you can do, and you’re going to experience it as very restrictive.

GPAs don’t predict anything about who is going to be a successful employee. “One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation,” Bock said. “Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything. What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who have never gone to college.”

That was a pretty remarkable insight, and I asked Bock to elaborate.

“After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different,” he said. “You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently. Another reason is that I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment. One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.”

Please share your thoughts on these insights below, and as I’ll be tweeting frequently on Twitter @basseysamco button to see future posts.

How Google Surpassed Apple in Design -- and How Apple's Coming Back

When Larry Page became Google (NASDAQ: GOOG  ) CEO in early 2011, one of his first moves was to implement Project Kennedy, a company wide effort to redesign all of the search giant's most important products under a cohesive and unified new design language. Up until that point, the look and feel of Google's services was largely disparate and usability differed dramatically among apps.

Google focused first on its four most prominent services: Search, Maps, Gmail, and Calendar. Over the past two years, investors have seen a steady stream of beautifully designed apps for both Android and iOS, all of which share common aesthetics and interface metaphors. In some ways, Android is now more intuitive than iOS thanks to Big G embracing innovative new gestures.

Source: Behance.

In no uncertain terms, the key was a serious focus on collaboration between product groups. Google recently posted some of its graphic design guidelines on Behance (Part 1 and Part 2), illustrating a very distinct style and conveying detailed principles.

From leader to laggardFor a company that really taught the market how much design truly matters, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL  ) has admittedly lagged its mobile rival in some respects over the past couple years, most notably in the iOS user interface.

The 2007 look and feel of iOS simply wouldn't cut it any more in 2013, and Apple's dramatic overhaul of the core interface is an important risk that the company must take. Apple is now doubling down on design, even though that has always been one of its core values.

It goes beyond iOS. Apple is reaffirming this to the world and launching a new ad campaign that shows how serious it is about strengthening its brand. One clip outlines the underlying philosophies that drive each product.

Another drives home the emotional connection that Apple wants customers to make with technology. The first word in Apple's "signature" has always been "Designed" for a reason.

At a time when rivals are increasingly hostile with their ad campaigns, Apple is putting the focus back on the consumer and emphasizing how it can design products to improve people's lives.

And back to leader againMuch like Google, this renewed shift is being facilitated by Apple's own structural shift toward increased collaboration under Tim Cook. This is perhaps one of Cook's most important and underappreciated moves since becoming CEO, perhaps because it is only now starting to bear fruit. Steve Jobs had set up an organizational hierarchy within Apple that favored departmentalism due to his obsession with secrecy, even internally. That reduced the chances of leaks, but also arguably hindered Apple's ability to collaborate.

Previous iOS chief Scott Forstall was notoriously difficult to work with, and his ouster allowed all of software engineering to be consolidated under Craig Federighi. Jony Ive taking over all interface design is paving the way for a more coherent look between hardware and software.

iOS 7 icon design. Source: Apple.

Given the magnitude of the iOS 7 overhaul, there's already much debate regarding the new look. More important than individual nitpicks about some ugly icons or unfamiliar elements (things that can be addressed or updated in future releases), Apple is signaling the start of a new era of even tighter integration between hardware, software, and services with a greater focus on unified design.

As i've puts it:

We brought together a broad range of expertise, from design to engineering. With what we've been able to achieve together, we see iOS 7 as defining an important new direction, and in many ways a beginning.

Apple is coming back with a vengeance.

There's no doubt that Apple is at the center of technology's largest revolution ever, and that longtime shareholders have been handsomely rewarded with over 1,000% gains. However, there is a debate raging as to whether Apple remains a buy. The Motley Fool's senior technology analyst and managing bureau chief, Eric Bleeker, is prepared to fill you in on reasons to buy and reasons to sell Apple, and what opportunities are left for the company (and your portfolio) going forward. To get instant access to his latest thinking on Apple, simplyclick here now.

Google Glass - one of 2012′s best inventions alongside MakerBot and the Mars rover

TIME magazine released its list of the best inventions of 2012 and among them are the MakerBot, the Mars rover Curiosity, and Google’s latest creation, the much-talked about, Google Glass.

Going for $1,500, this pair of glasses is basically your computer right on top of your head. The goal is to help make augmented reality a daily part of our lives using just a tiny computer within the frame of the glasses. For those of us already wearing eyeglasses, think of it like you can use your eyes to simply pull up weather, store specials, sports scores as you’re looking at a baseball stadium, or whatever you want — all while simply moving your head as you walk down the street.

Using its half-inch display, Google says that you’ll be able to also take and share photos, video-chat, check appointments, and access maps and the Internet right from the device.

For developers, this opens up some interesting opportunities to change the mobile space significantly — it looks like the company wants to expand mobile to not simply be limited by the phones or tablets. But at the same time, there are those who are skeptical about its value in the world — you might also think that an announcement of a “revolutionary” device two-years out would just be vaporware — it might even remind people of Microsoft Courier or what we may have hoped for with the Palm Pre.

And what about the privacy issues that it has? Sure it’s different and not since the iPhone has the world been so interested, but there are also concerns about what this means to our data — how will this affect advertising or what Google knows about us (if not everything already). Is this going to change the Do Not Track policy to include eyeball movements?

But with all the negativity surrounding it, Google Glass benefits the developers because it opens up new areas of innovation and development — instead of understanding the hand movements of a user, now they’ll probably need to adjust their strategy for eyeball movements. This might lead to a whole new wave of applications never thought possible because the eye was never factored in.

At its last developers conference, Google offered attendees a chance to be one of the first to own their very own Google Glasses — for those interested to buy a pair, you’ll have to wait until 2014 to get it.