Google wants Android to move into people’s homes with the open-source software controlling everything from smart light bulbs to sound systems.
More than 5,000 software savants at Google’s annual developers conference in San Francisco on Tuesday were shown an “Android@Home” software platform for making dumb devices smart and robots manageable.
Among the innovations on display were light bulbs that can be controlled by Android-powered gadgets and a Tungsten sound system that could be synched to Google’s freshly launched Internet “cloud” music storage service.
Android light bulbs are to hit the market by the end of the year and developers were invited to turn them into smartphone-controlled alarm clocks for waking people up in the mornings.
“We are extending the Android platform into the home,” Google senior vice president of mobile Andy Rubin said.
“It’s a lot of fun,” he continued. “The power of Android is that it can be used by a lot of people in a lot of different ways. We are going to see some pretty interesting stuff.”
The technology has the potential to turn Android smartphones or tablets into remote controls for lights, appliances, irrigation systems, thermostats and more, according to Google.
The company also on Tuesday said it is packing the best of its Honeycomb tablet computer software into a new “Ice Cream Sandwich” version of Android for mobile devices.
The California-based Internet titan planned to release Ice Cream Sandwich by the end of the year and promised that it is being designed to run smartphones, tablets and any other Android gadgets.
“Our top priority for Ice Cream Sandwich will be one operating system that runs everywhere,” Android engineering team chief Mike Claron said. “We are taking all the good stuff we added to Honeycomb for tablets and making it available everywhere.”
Google crafted Honeycomb from the ground up to power tablet computers being rushed to market to compete with Apple’s hot-selling iPads.
Android software is free and Google was concerned that tablet makers would resort to using a prior version of the open-source operating system geared for smartphones, but not optimal for tablets.
Meanwhile, Google on Tuesday launched an invitation-only test version of an online music service, which does not sell songs but allows users to store their collection for use on various devices.
“When you add your music to the new service, you can listen to it on the Web on any compatible device,” Google product manager Paul Joyce said in announcing the new service.
Google was getting around having to cut deals with music labels by crafting a service that lets people store digital versions of songs they already own in an online “locker” they can access using gadgets linked to the Internet.
As many as 20,000 songs could be stored at Google Music, Joyce said at the conference in San Francisco.
Google Music began rolling out in the US and was by invitation only. People could request invitations online at music.google.com.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts