Google is reportedly prepping an audio ad platform that will be integrated into its upcoming streaming music service. That’s according to MediaPost, which reports that the 10, 15 and 30 second audio ads will support the music service.

That service, reportedly coming as soon as November, will sell music online and notably stream purchased music — and music stored on home computers — to Android mobile devices. That makes it a competitor not only to iTunes but also to streaming services like Pandora. Google’s music service will be linked with its search platform and may even include YouTube.

The inclusion of audio ads in such a service isn’t surprising, as MediaPost points out. Back in February 2009, Google dropped its broadcast radio ad program to focus on streaming audio ads.

Hewlett Packard is rumoured to have shelved plans to launch tablet PCs and smartphones based on Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 7 and Google’s Android platforms in order to concentrate on webOS-based devices. The Wall Street Journal’s 'All Things Digital' blog is among those to suggest that HP may be reconsidering its multi-OS strategy in light of its US$1.2 billion acquisition of Palm in April, which saw it inherit Palm's highly-regarded webOS smartphone platform. HP had originally planned to launch an Android-based tablet computer in the fourth quarter of the year, but sources say this has now been delayed. HP was also one of the eight vendors announced by Microsoft to be developing a Windows 7 smartphone, but its name was absent from a list of vendors presented by Microsoft at a partner conference this week.

In separate news, Business Insider reports that as many as 16 firms may have competed with HP to buy Palm, including five serious potential suitors. According to sources, Apple, Google, BlackBerry-maker Research In Motion and Lenovo all submitted bids.

The ‘Google App Inventor’ lets users create apps “visually” and through a series of “blocks”, a process which the technology company claims requires “NO programming knowledge”.

This all sounds good, but early demos of the tool still look a tad too daunting to the average consumer.

However, The New York Times reports that Google has been testing the app inventor out in groups that include sixth graders, whom the company claims are able to develop their own apps. Not that these apps are any good, of course.

See here how it works:

Google may be about to heighten tensions with Apple following reports that the Internet giant is working on launch this year of a music download service tied to its search engine. According to a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) report, the Google music service would then later develop into an online ‘cloud-based’ subscription service that runs on Android devices. No specific details were mentioned in the report.

The WSJ article notes that Google has already pushed into music and begun linking to partner websites such as iLike and Pandora through its search engine, allowing users to stream songs with one click from its search page. Google’s entry into music stores would pit itself against Apple’s iTunes store. According to the WSJ report, Google’s push into music retailing is “likely to be welcomed by music labels that are increasingly concerned about Apple’s dominant position among US music retailers.” Interestingly, Apple recently acquired and then closed online music service Lala.com, leading to speculation it too might also soon launch a new cloud-based version of iTunes.

Will consumer-focused videoconferencing from the desktop and perhaps even more intriguingly via mobile devices really kick of? In recent days and weeks, Google purchased GIPS, in part for its HD voice codecs but also its videoconferencing technology, which could get added to the Android platform; Skype started rolling out broader support for group video calls; and Cisco dropped hints about a $500 home telepresence setup for consumers.

Guaranteeing the necessary bandwidth and dealing with latency issues makes mobile and consumer videoconferencing a major telco opportunity, not an over-the-top threat. Just as mobile VoIP hasn’t really taken off as a purely OTT sensation, look for the same dynamic — only to an even greater extreme — to play out with video communications. That’s in part why the Verizon/Skype partnership on mobile VoIP is so interesting (and why Skype is making such a big bet on the partnership). By setting up dedicated signaling and session connections to support mobile Skype, Verizon can help deliver better voice service while at the same time instantly tapping into Skype’s major global user base.

Reserving and guaranteeing real-time session streams for video communications will be even more important, whether it be video delivered from a mobile device over a mobile data network or a home-based telepresence service such as Cisco is proposing. Think $500 is a bit much just to get that Cisco telepresence device into your home? Imagine how overpriced it will appear if the real-time streaming video services delivered to it in a pure OTT fashion are marred by jitter and delay. Look for so-called over-the-top video players to cut deals with service providers to take advantage of next-generation QOS guarantees and protocols like real-time transport protocol supported in the network to make videoconferencing into a service actually worth paying for.

During the Google I/O Conference in San Francisco, Google announced a direct-to-TV video service called Google TV. Partners for Google TV are global industry heavyweights Intel, Sony, Logitech, Adobe, Best Buy, and DISH Network.

Google Owns YouTube
Google owns YouTube. No longer just a fun site featuring fuzzy videos of furry animals, Hollywood studios use it to launch marketing campaigns for blockbuster movies, and provide pay-per-view movie rentals. The worlds of professional comedy and music rely on YouTube for continuing exposure to their end-users. Major corporations are posting important marketing videos and news organizations post in-depth stories on the site. None of the other over-the-top (OTT) services owns content with the scale and depth of YouTube. Google TV positions YouTube to expand beyond PCs and mobile handsets into living rooms.

WebM Project and VP8 Will Expand YouTube’s Reach
Google's new free WebM-project video Coder/Decoder (CODEC), called VP8, will let YouTube content be re-purposed at different video resolutions. These video and audio files can be viewed directly by any WebM-capable browser, and it supports high quality viewing over congested final-mile connections. The Google TV extensions that bring Android into set top boxes and to TV sets create an ecosystem in which an Android phone will be able to send machine-to-machine messages to various connected devices in your home, or to your mobile computers. MIPS Technologies, a leading supplier of set top box processor architectures and cores, is already using Android and supports the WebM project’s new VP8 video and audio CODEC technology. Texas Instruments announced support for VP8 with their industry-leading OMAP cellular phone processors. ARM has also announced support for VP8.

DISH Network Pairs Pay-TV with Over-the-Top
In-Stat’s latest consumer research shows that most people want both high-quality HDTV programs and convenient access to content from the Internet. Later this year, DISH Network subscribers using Google TV will be able to simultaneously search for content across DISH Network, the Internet, and their DVRs using a single remote control. They will be able to overlay online content related to television shows, movies, actors, and more, and also hyperlink web content back to multichannel TV. DISH has been working with Google on Google TV Ads for some time, so this looks like a natural extension of that relationship.

Best Buy, home of The Geek Squad, has over 1,400 stores in the US and Canada, and another 2,600 in Europe. They are perfectly positioned to benefit by supporting Google TV. Over 180,000 Best Buy “blue shirt” personnel will be ready to welcome interested consumers and help them take a look. When Google TV launches, there should be a substantial amount of compelling content being packaged and presented for demonstrations at the point of sale.

Adobe, Sony, Logitech, and Intel Provide Major Name-Brand Support
Adobe announced that their new Flash Player 10.1 will soon be available for mobile phones running Android 2.2, as well as Google TV devices. The new version was designed with mobile in mind. Flash 10.1 supports touch-screen gestures and accelerometers that are built into Android phones. The Flash player will also support smart zoom, full-screen mode, and smart rendering. Flash Player 10.1 is designed to access and display all the same videos and applications on mobile devices that are available through web browsers.

Sony is already shipping TV sets that include built-in Ethernet and broadband capabilities. New Sony TV sets that include Intel's semiconductors and the Google TV software are planned to begin shipping later this year. With Google TV as a partner for aggregating online content, Sony will gain access to YouTube video “channels” that will differentiate Sony’s TV sets in the highly competitive consumer TV retail marketplace. Sony views their participation in Google TV as taking a leading position for the next generation of TV experiences. The Intel devices and the Google TV technology could readily be embedded into Sony's Blu-ray players and into a wide range of new set top boxes.

Logitech’s world-leading line of wireless keypads, mice, and universal remote controls are being adapted to provide the user connections to the Google TV service. Logitech’s Harmony remote control technology will interoperate with existing set top boxes in a consumer’s home, letting them use one remote control to tune-in broadcast and Pay-TV content, and instantly switch to Google TV services that come in via broadband. Future iterations of the hardware may also support non-keyboard inputs, such as sensors with software that recognize a person’s hand gestures or voice commands.

Intel is defining their participation in Google TV as a technology enabler. The Intel Consumer Electronic (CE) series of high-performance devices will be used inside new Sony-branded connected TV sets, and in an initial "Buddy Box" from Logitech that will provide broadband connections to early adopters.

Intel’s Consumer Electronics devices provide a roadmap for continuing performance increases, and the ability to “slice and dice” a range of features to obtain the optimal price/performance mix for high-volume consumer products. Intel has also announced that their Atom CE Media Processors will be used in a new Internet Protocol (IP) set top box expected to launch in 2011 by Liberty Global, Europe’s second largest Cable TV service provider. This box will be manufactured by Samsung, and includes the NDS middleware and Nagravision's NAGRA Media Access Conditional Access (CA) technology. Set top boxes made by Metrological and Amino provide "real world" examples of the kind of horsepower and innovation that Intel is bringing to broadband-delivered video in the coming years.

Just when the H.264 video codec is starting to take over a large portion of new Web videos, along comes Google to shake things up again. Today, along with Mozilla and Opera, it is launching the WebM Project, an open, royalty-free codec that can run in HTML5 browsers without the need for Flash.

Up till now, the battle between Flash and HTML5 video has centered around the H.264 codec, which is gaining broad adoption. Apple supports H.264 in all of its devices such as iPads and iPhones, and it is one of the technical reasons Steve Jobs cites for why there is less and less need to support Flash. H.264 is a modern codec, fast and light. It’s great except for one thing. It is owned by the MPEG-LA consortium, which doesn’t charge royalties for its use today, but currently plans to start enforcing royalties in 2015. The royalty threat is the reason Mozilla supports an older open codex called Ogg Theora in Firefox instead of H.264.

But Google is donating a much better codec, called VP8, which it acquired with its purchase of On2 Techchnolgies. The WebM Project is a new container file format for Web video. It includes the VP8 video codec, the open Vorbis audio codec, file extensions and a new mime type. Any video player can adopt it, including Flash. And, in fact, Flash is one of the 40 launch technology partners supporting WebM.

Chrome, Firefox, and Opera browsers will all support WebM, and Google will give it a big push by making YouTube videos support it as well. Will Safari and IE join as well? Apple is pushing H.264 pretty hard, but there is no reason it couldn’t support WebM as well in the future. If it doesn’t, we might have a Web video standards war on our hands.

Other launch partners include Skype, Nvidia, Qualcomm, AMD, ARM, Brightcove, Encoding.com, Kaltura, and HD Cloud.

From Google’s Android Developer site — evidence in graphical form of the fragmentation of Android devices. This is a potential problem for Google and its service provider customers.

For Android, fragmentation comes in the form of different “dot” releases of the core OS, which even in the short time it’s been around have diverged rather significantly. For instance, only the latest releases of the OS have talk-to-text input options and other key new features, and for app developers having to keep up with different OS versions can be particularly complicated.

Somewhat surprising in the graphic above is the concentration of pre-2.0 Android devices out there — mainly T-Mobile myTouch’s but including other devices as well that either launched early or chose not to go the full 2.0 route. The over-the-air upgrade process by operators for Android has been somewhat mixed — for instance, Verizon took forever to upgrade the Droid from 2.0 to 2.1 — only exacerbating the problem.

At a time when Android growth is outpacing other players, fragmentation poses a real threat to that momentum by frustrating developers, confusing customers and placing an undue burden on operators that have to support the platform.

Ubiquisys, maker of femtocell technology that allows you as a user to plug a tiny box into your broadband modem to get increase the mobile phone reception in your home, has created the first sub $100 femtocell product. This is a big deal, they claim, because there’s a psychological barrier many people run into when they’re asked to spend triple digits for something that their operator shouldn’t have to sell them in the first place had their networks been built properly.

This new model that Chris is talking about is called the “G3-Mini” and is built by SerComm. It can handle up to 8 simultaneous calls (double what AT&T’s “Microcell” can do) and 14.4 megabit per second data down, 5.7 megabit per second up, all while using less than 5 watts. Google and T-Mobile have invested in Ubiquisys.

Google embraces mobile, makes announcements in a special keynote at World Mobile Congress in Barcelona

Schmidt outlined how Google’s top programmers were now concentrating on mobile as their primary focus; he also pointed to recent acquisitions in the mobile space, notably AdMob. 

Unveiling a new Google mantra - ‘Mobile First’ - Schmidt proclaimed that three unique areas had now converged on the mobile device: computing power, interconnectivity and the cloud: “The phone is where these three all interconnect  and you need to get these three waves right if you want to win.” He highlighted Internet phenomenons such as Spotify, Facebook - and Google itself - as leading the cloud concept across both fixed and mobile. “If you don’t use the power of the cloud you will fail,” he said.

He added that in places such as Indonesia and South Africa Google was now seeing more searches on mobile than via the desktop.

Google programmers joining Schmidt on stage demonstrated the firm’s latest developments, including efforts to merge its speech and image recognition technology; the firm impressed with a preview of an optical character recognition (OCR) tool that was able to recognise and translate a picture of a German menu into English. Google announced that German has now been added to its speech system as its fourth language.

Schmidt also provided an update on Google’s Android platform, which he said was now running across 26 different devices. He said that Android handset vendors were selling  more than 60,000 per day, a figure that has doubled over the last quarter. During an Android demonstration, Google’s Eric Tseng announced that the platform now supports Flash – the full Flash version (10.2) rather than Flash Lite – allowing gaming and movies over handsets. The announcement will give Android devices an advantage over Apple’s iPhone, which does not support the technology.