The Verge - Exclusives

Twitter granted patent on pull-to-refresh, promises to only use it defensively

2013-05-21T14:04:57Z

Twitter was just officially granted a patent on the ubiquitous pull-to-refresh gesture — a touch interface concept the company acquired when it purchased Tweetie developer Atebits in 2010 and hired founder Loren Brichter, who invented the move.

"I had started working on the patent two months before the Twitter deal," said Brichter during a phone call yesterday. The application was officially filed the day before Brichter signed the Twitter acquisition paperwork. "The patent was the cherry on top," he says.

"I have plenty of feelings about the patent system and how broken it is."

But like many engineers, Brichter was worried about rampant abuse of patents in the tech industry, particularly software patents. "I have plenty of feelings about the patent system and how broken it is," he says. To alleviate those concerns, Twitter agreed to only use his patent defensively — the company wouldn't sue other companies that were using pull-to-refresh in apps unless those companies sued first. That's why Brichter had filed for the patent in the first place. "I realized that I'd invented something valuable and I could have a bullet in the chamber, god forbid."

That original defense-only provision developed over time into what Twitter is calling the Innovator's Patent Agreement— a contract between the company and its engineers promising that any patents developed during their employment will only be used defensively. Twitter rolled out a first public draft of the IPA just over a year ago, and after seeking feedback from a wide range of sources, the company is launching version 1.0 today alongside the pull-to-refresh patent. The agreement is wide-ranging and includes a provision allowing engineers to kill wrongful lawsuits by issuing licenses to their inventions if Twitter breaks its promises.

"The IPA is an expression of the values of the company."

And to keep everyone on notice, Twitter plans to include a copy of the IPA in all of its patent registrations — a formal reminder that the company is limited in how it can use them.

"[Engineers] were going around saying we're worried about what patents mean," said Twitter IP attorney Ben Lee, who drafted the IPA and guided it through the revision process. "The IPA is an expression of the values of the company."

Lee's work on the IPA began during his initial job interview with Twitter general counsel Alex Macgillivray in November of 2010. "The notion of trying to come up with new ways of handling patents was a major reason for me coming to Twitter in the first place," he said. "I don't think it was that long after that we were already having significant conversations with the engineers and senior management about some things we could do."

Unfortunately, work on the IPA was put on hold not long after Lee joined Twitter — a patent troll had sued the company over a junk patent on "virtual communities," and Lee spent serious time living in a Virginia hotel room as the case went to trial. "We've seen the negative impact" of patent abuse, he says. "And we're a young company."

"Guess his favorite beer."

After a year of work, a jury invalidated the troll's patent and Lee resumed drafting the IPA. He also began a process of outreach, confidentially soliciting feedback from people Lee calls "damn good lawyers" across academia and the legal community. Lee also had to talk to Twitter's management and board of directors — who were supportive even though the IPA meant Twitter could never build a lucrative licensing business like Microsoft's with the technology it developed. (It's hard to collect licensing fees when you've promised never to sue anyone, after all.)

"The board was very supportive," Lee said. "Anyone who's had significant exposure to patent issues in the Valley has very strong opinions on what the proper way out is." The next step was naming the agreement — and after a lengthy meeting with the engineers resulted in nothing, inspiration struck. "Alex will kill me," says Lee with a smile. "Guess his favorite beer."

"The problem is how to define defensive purposes."

But while promising to use patents only for defensive purposes makes perfect sense at first blush, it becomes much more complicated in practice. "The concept is easy to explain," says Lee. "The problem is how to define ‘defensive purposes.'"

Perhaps unsurprisingly, that definition in version 1.0 of the IPA is fairly broad: Twitter can still sue any company that files, threatens, or even voluntarily participates in a patent lawsuit against Twitter, its affiliates, customers, suppliers, or distributors. It can also sue any company that's filed or participated in an offensive patent lawsuit in the past 10 years, and it can further use IPA patents to "deter" a threatened patent suit against Twitter or its users, affiliates, customers, suppliers, or distributors.

That's a pretty wide open list of targets — Twitter can certainly sue Apple, which has filed several patent lawsuits against Android smartphone vendors in the past few years. It can also sue Google, whose Motorola subsidiary has sued Apple and Microsoft. Yahoo? Check. Microsoft? Check. (Twitter isn't planning to sue any of these companies, says Lee. "All of these companies are our partners," he says. "It's not something that has even come up.")

Twitter attorney Ben Lee, author of the Innovator's Patent Agreement

"There's a million good reasons that maybe you went offensive," says Lee. "But once you've done it, there has to be some ramification for it — in this case, for 10 years, you've come out of the IPA." But finding excuses to sue other companies wasn't the point, he adds. "We took the best hack we could to make certain that when we say ‘defensive' it made sense to us."

Lee accepts the criticism that this first draft of the IPA leaves loopholes in play. "I think it's perfectly legitimate for someone to say, ‘You know what, that balance is crappy, the line should have been over here, or here.'" But he's proud of the work Twitter's done to involve the engineers in the process, and to give them some voice in how their patents are used. "So many engineers are taught to just not even bother looking at the application — to just sign and pretend it doesn't exist. That's not good. They're not part of the process in a way where they can actually help the situation."

"If other people can't use pull-to-refresh, they can never build on top of it."

Not so for the IPA, he says. "I would hope the relationship between [Twitter] and the engineer is different. The engineer has checks and balances."

Brichter echoes the sentiment. "I really hope this becomes the de facto standard for hiring — engineers could demand this in their contracts." He notes that pull-to-refresh was built on top of Apple's rubber-band scrolling behavior, and says good ideas should inspire more good ideas. "If other people can't use pull-to-refresh, they can never build on top of it either." He says other developers shouldn't worry about using pull-to-refresh in their apps. "Twitter and I see eye-to-eye on the patent system."

"Where the patent system works is recognizing an engineer for doing something cool," says Lee. "The rest of this is about doing something to fix the other aspects."

But even the part that works can feel strange: Brichter sounds slightly sheepish when I ask him what it's like to know he'll forever be credited with inventing pull-to-refresh, a gesture that has become a central feature of modern touch interfaces. "I think it's really cool," he says.

"It is a little weird though."

How two Valve engineers walked away with the company's augmented reality glasses

2013-05-18T18:01:26Z

Three months ago, celebrated video game publisher Valve did something completely out of character: it fired up to 25 workers, in what one employee dubbed the "great cleansing." At the time, co-founder Gabe Newell quickly reassured gamers that the company wouldn't be canceling any projects, but it just so happens that one project managed to get away.

Valve was secretly working on a pair of augmented reality glasses... and those glasses are still being built by two Valve employees who lost their jobs that day.

"This is what I'm going to build come hell or high water."

Former Valve hardware engineer Jeri Ellsworth and programmer Rick Johnson spent over a year working on the project at Valve, and have been putting in six days a week, 16+ hours a day on the project ever since. "We believed in it... that this is going to change the way that people interact with computers and play games," says Ellsworth. "This is what I'm going to build come hell or high water. It was just a no-brainer that when we were not at Valve... we just had to do it." They formed a company, Technical Illusions, to commercialize the tech. This weekend, they flew down to Maker Faire to show their crazy prototype to the world for the very first time.

It's called CastAR, and it's nothing like Google Glass or the Oculus Rift. The idea here is to project a miniature virtual reality, which you can see and interact with in three dimensions, into the real world.

Four key components make it work. First, a pair of miniature projectors attached to the glasses beam images from a connected PC. A special retroreflective projector screen bounces them back to your face. There, the active shutter glasses filter out images for each of your left and right eyes, 120 times a second, so that you see those images in 3D.

Lastly — and this is the tricky part — a camera built into the glasses sees infrared LEDs positioned around the edges of that projector screen so that the glasses can optically track the exact position of your head, allowing the software to adjust the 3D perspective in real time so that you can physically look around objects that don't even exist. It's basically the famous Johnny Chung Lee demo with the Nintendo Wii remote, except the team has custom algorithms for extremely low latency. With additional pennies-on-the-dollar cameras placed around the surface, the system can track other objects as well, like the infrared wand Ellsworth handed me for my first demo.

I played a game of destructive Jenga with the wand, smashing towers of virtual blocks with a virtual wrecking ball. I craned my head over the surface, looked down, and marveled as they fell into the depths below the actual surface of the table. I flew over a Minecraft-like rough landscape, using nothing but my head to steer. I got a taste of how CastAR could work with virtual toys, a la Skylanders, by placing little RFID tokens on a surface and watching them grow into Team Fortress 2's Scout and Heavy characters.

Finally, Ellsworth showed me the best thing yet. We played a multiplayer game with two Xbox controllers where we stood shoulder to shoulder, laughing at one another's antics as we mowed down zombies (and one another) in a zany capture the flag / king of the hill shooting game. There, even though we were looking at the same surface, the glasses gave us our own unique 3D perspective.

Thanks to the retroreflective surface, so much of the light gets reflected directly back to the viewer that there's very little cross-talk between players... you pretty much only see the light intended for you, which makes adding additional friends easy so long as they have their own pair of specs. There's also enough light to use the device in a moderately sunlit room, or from a reasonable distance away. While the Maker Faire demos were like interacting with small dioramas due to the fairly small projector screens, you could theoretically build a holodeck of sorts by putting retroreflective surfaces on every wall.

I should mention here that while the concept was impressive, the glasses themselves are extremely early, not anywhere close to fit for public consumption right now. Even the original Oculus Rift, virtual reality ski goggles held together with duct tape and dreams, felt a little more put-together than the CastAR prototypes that Ellsworth spent 40 hours painstakingly soldering. Hot glue and bare chips are the theme of the day, though that admittedly fits right in here at Maker Faire.

A holodeck isn't necessarily in the cards, by the way: one of the reasons they're bringing the idea to Maker Faire is to solicit ideas and figure out just what kinds of games and experiences would actually be popular. While Johnson envisions little children filling their Tonka trucks with virtual sand; family board games; and incredible sessions of Dungeons & Dragons, it's really still in the experimental phase, and the team says while some of their creations were a blast (hilarious zombie screams distracting the team from their work!) others weren't as entertaining as they thought they might be. "I suspect we're going to be very surprised about what people find fun in this space," Ellsworth said.

Hot glue and hot chips: this handmade prototype will be replaced by sleeker glasses

After Maker Faire, a Kickstarter project is the next step: in late summer or early fall, interested parties will be able to pledge money towards the system's development. Ellsworth and Johnson think they can get the cost of a basic system below $200 thanks to the commodity components they're using and their own expertise; Ellsworth has built low-cost chips ranging from video decoders to componentized video games, and is personally working on a low-cost infrared tracking chip. Meanwhile, Johnson is building the software to allow people to build games... impressively, he modified the code to change the game world while I was actually playing. Still, that's a good bit of money and a quite of setup (imagine: you have to have a special surface, glasses, and perhaps a wand or other objects) to play what might be very simple games to begin with.

While their current intent is to build a platform, get the hardware into developers' hands, and see what they build, Johnson says it won't be a dev kit for good: "It's a real product that we will commercialize." It's just too early to say how.

An artist's rendition of the final product.

So if the idea is so fantastic, why did Valve give it up? The Technical Illusions team wasn't completely comfortable talking about it. "I came on and I recruited all of my friends, and my colleagues, all the people I could find, and a lot of them are still there. I wish them the best in what they're doing, and I'd hate to do anything to hurt them or derail things they've got going," she says.

Still, before long, part of the story comes out. Valve's hardware initiative was researching both augmented reality and virtual reality... and the virtual reality supporters won out. "You can imagine that Valve is known for a certain class of game," says Johnson. Augmented reality simply isn't as suitable for the first-person shooters that Valve has built its reputation on.

Jeri Ellsworth and Rick Johnson.

And yet, Ellsworth and Johnson didn't want to let go. "I didn't even want to do VR and AR at first, but someone else in our group was really excited about it and I played along," Ellsworth says, but after six months she decided that AR was the future and apparently wound up on the losing side of Valve's internal struggle. Johnson, working on Valve's Linux team at the time, had already been spending his free hours helping Ellsworth after bonding over a shared love of arcade machines, and decided to join her. "I've done a gazillion first-person shooters, and this is the first time where I can totally do a new type of experience. That's where my passion is," he says.

For its part, Valve has released all interest in the project, leaving the Technical Illusions team legally clear to do what they love. Says Ellsworth: "Gabe was completely behind it... I talked to Gabe, and he talked to the lawyers, and he's like, 'It's theirs, make it happen,' because he could see we were passionate about it."

Video by John Lagomarsino

Microsoft planning Xbox dashboard UI and tile changes in preparation for next-gen console

2013-05-17T16:05:53Z

Microsoft is preparing to update its Xbox 360 with another dashboard update. Sources familiar with Microsoft's Xbox plans have revealed to The Verge that the dashboard update will enter into a public beta in late June or early July, with changes and updates in preparation for the next-generation Xbox. We're told that the user interface will be refreshed alongside smaller Live Tiles, similar to what Microsoft is preparing for Windows 8.1. Microsoft is also said to be tweaking the look of the Xbox dashboard, with the possibility of darker or lighter themes.

We understand Microsoft is aiming to ensure Xbox 360 users can transition over to the next-generation console and interact with existing Xbox 360 users using messaging, beacons, and achievements. Microsoft will also phase out the use of its Points system with this dashboard update, replacing it with currency and gift card options. We're told that the final update will be made available, providing the public beta testing goes to plan, in August.

All will be revealed soon

Microsoft is holding a special event at its campus in Redmond on May 21st to unveil the next-generation Xbox. Sources have revealed to us that the event will include details of the new interactive TV features that the company is building into its next console. Microsoft is also expected to show off a smaller and denser Xbox console with newly designed controllers that are said to be "flattened" in appearance. Stay tuned to The Verge for our usual live blog coverage and a special edition Vergecast on May 21st.

Microsoft isn't commenting about any planned dashboard changes. "We don’t have anything new to announce at this time," says a spokesperson.

How Google beat Apple to a streaming music service

2013-05-17T15:33:59Z

Google's long-rumored Play Music All Access service is already out the door, while Apple's iRadio is still bogged down in licensing talks. According to music industry sources, all the haggling could prevent Apple from debuting the service at the Worldwide Developers Conference next month.

Sony/ATV, the largest music publisher, has rejected Apple's terms according to published reports. What's more, The Verge has learned this week that BMG Rights Management, the fourth largest music publisher, is also holding out. Insiders say that there's still plenty of "market momentum" behind iRadio and some of the industry's largest players — including Universal Music Group, which was the first to license songs for the service — want to see it launch as soon as possible.

Some of the industry's largest players want to see iRadio launch as soon as possible

How was Google able to secure deals for All Access, which was unveiled at Google I/O on Wednesday, while Apple has been stymied? For starters, Google chose to offer a standard subscription music service very similar to those built by Spotify and Rdio, and that meant the terms had largely been established, according to multiple sources close to the talks. Apple, on the other hand, is pioneering a hybrid web and radio service — one that resembles Pandora but melds it with some on-demand features, the sources said. The licensing agreement had to be created from scratch.

"Of course [Apple's] negotiations were going to take longer," one of the sources said.

Multiple industry insiders say that Google also had an easier time of getting licensed because it agreed to pay advances to some of the major copyright owners. Apple has a long history of refusing to pay advances and — at least initially — didn't offer any. Sources say that Apple has agreed to pay content owners a share of ad revenue, a per-play fee, and a minimum guarantee.

Sources say Apple has agreed to pay content owners a share of ad revenue

Google's Access Music is also a Spotify-like, on-demand model and that's much more lucrative for the labels than Pandora's webcasting service, which is what iRadio will resemble. To be sure, iRadio is no Pandora clone. If it was, it would never get licensed.

The record companies and music publishers don't want another web radio service that satisfies a lot of music consumption but doesn't pay them much. "It's very important that new digital services pay songwriters and music publishers a fair share of the money," said David Israelite, president of the National Music Publishers Association, which is not involved in the negotiations. Israelite has been vocal about what he believes are the inequities in compensation between the labels and publishers. "We can not repeat the disaster that was Pandora where songwriters were asked to take a tiny fraction of the revenue."

The reality is that the music industry is happy to see mammoth tech companies like Apple and Google, which have up to now focused on download sales, embrace what the labels refer to as "access models." The widely held belief by industry leaders is that to stop the slide in music sales, consumers have to be offered unlimited access to deep pools of songs that are supported by either small, monthly subscription fees, or advertising sales.

These tech titans can afford to take a loss

Spotify is the top music subscription service. The company has attracted more than 6 million paying subscribers by enabling them to listen to any song in its library anytime they want for $9.99 a month. Over at Pandora, the online radio service plays songs randomly and relies on ad sales to pay the bills. But neither of these companies have come close to generating profits; the top record companies hope that Apple and Google can wade in and do a better job of that. And if streaming music turns out not to be a profitable business, these tech titans can afford to take a loss, as long as it makes their overall ecosystems more attractive when considering which smartphone, tablet, or set-top box to buy.

Google demands Microsoft remove YouTube Windows Phone app, cites lack of ads

2013-05-15T20:07:27Z

Microsoft updated its own YouTube application for Windows Phone just over a week ago and Google isn't impressed. The Verge has obtained a copy of a cease and desist letter that Google has sent to Microsoft recently, demanding that Microsoft "immediately withdraw this application from the Windows Phone Store and disable existing downloads of the application by Wednesday, May 22, 2013." Microsoft's YouTube app for Windows Phone appears to have taken Google by surprise.

Windows Phone app violates API use

Google's complaint centers on the lack of ads in Microsoft's YouTube app, something it claims is a direct violation of the terms and conditions of the company's YouTube API. The Verge has learned that Microsoft created the app without Google's consent with features that specifically prevent ads from playing. The lack of ads clearly hits Google's own revenues, but also those of its third-party content creators that are paid through the company's AdSense program. "Unfortunately, by blocking advertising and allowing downloads of videos, your application cuts off a valuable ongoing revenue source for creators, and causes harm to the thriving content ecosystem on YouTube," says Google's letter, addressed to Microsoft's Todd Brix.

Microsoft has previously complained to the EU over Google's apparent refusal to let Windows Phone access YouTube metadata. While it initially seemed like both companies had reconciled their differences, that's clearly not the case. On stage at Google I/O today, CEO Larry Page detailed his take on technology's future, noting that industry negativity is holding back progress. Page told an audience member that "we struggle with people like Microsoft."

All the bickering means customers lose out

The relationship is clearly strained with campaigns like Scroogled, and the YouTube complaint is the latest in a set of issues between both companies. In December, Google announced its plans to drop Exchange ActiveSync support, a decision that left Microsoft sweating over its lack of the alternative CalDAV and CardDAV protocol support for Windows Phone. Despite this, it's clear the pair can work together on certain interperability. Just this week, Microsoft announced its plans to support Google Talk within Outlook.com, a change that's beneficial for consumers of both company's services.

For now, it appears that Windows Phone YouTube users will have to utilize unofficial third-party apps or settle for Google's mobile web version. Until Microsoft and Google can collaborate without bickering, it's the customers of both companies that lose out.

The Verge has reached out to Microsoft for comment on Google's cease and desist letter and we'll update you accordingly.

Update: Microsoft has responded to Google's demands, welcoming the addition of ads.

Can fancy photos and lavish linking help Google+ take off?

2013-05-15T17:58:28Z

Almost two years in, Google’s social network hasn’t siphoned much activity off of Facebook. But even if Google+ doesn’t yet have all your friends, it does have one of the world’s most powerful data centers at its disposal. Starting today, the network will start leveraging that power, focusing on winning users’ photos by making them look better than they do straight out of your camera.

“Your darkroom is now a Google data center,” said Vic Gundotra, who leads Google’s social efforts, in an interview with The Verge. Images have become the most compelling part of Google+, and that’s by design: Google is betting that if it can get your photos, it can eventually get your friends.

Data-center muscle is coming to Google’s social network in three ways: powerful processing that automates photo selection and image editing; a redesigned news feed that creates automated hashtags to encourage exploration; and a unified messaging service aimed at making Google your central communications hub.

The updates kick off a critical year for Google+, which launched as an effort to build the company a "social spine." In its first phase, the network created a single sign-on for all of Google’s services, inserted friends’ +1s and reviews into various search results, and built out an interest graph based on the behavior of logged-in users around the web. In the effort to unify Google’s products, at least, Google+ should be considered a success — though Gundotra says the company is only about 60 percent of the way done with that project.

Kicking off a critical year for Google+

The network now has 190 million people visiting plus.google.com each month, as well as 390 million logged-in Google account holders using its features monthly in at least one Google product. "It’s hard to believe it’s been under two years," Gundotra said. "We couldn’t be happier, with both those numbers and the trajectory and the growth that we’re seeing week over week."

At the same time, Google+ still suffers from the perception that it is largely irrelevant. Even as its user numbers grow, the average visitor spent just 6 minutes and 47 seconds on the site in March, according to Nielsen Media Research, compared with more than 6 hours on Facebook. Google disputes that number, saying it is far lower than what the company is seeing internally. Last year Google reported that the average user spends 12 minutes per day on Google+; it declined to share an updated figure. What’s not in dispute: Google+ lags far behind its peers in keeping visitors coming back.

Enter the data center. Google is betting that its powerful machine-learning algorithms will work not just to attract users to Google+, but to keep them there. And as with Instagram and Facebook before it, photographs will be central to the effort. Photographers were among the most enthusiastic early adopters of Google+, which alone among its peers displayed photos up to 2,048 pixels wide. (Last month Google began permitting full-size photos to be uploaded, though they count against the free 15GB shared-storage limit Google now has for Gmail, Drive, and Google+.) Until now, Google has worked to make Google+ the best online home for your photos. With today’s update, it wants to make your photos look better there than they do anywhere else.

With your permission, Google will now pick out your best photos, optimize them, and even create brand-new images and animations from your uploads. "We want to show people what happens when we combine your camera with the Google cloud," Gundotra said. "When you combine both, we think we can do magic. We can save you time. Because what we can do is we can take many of those labor-intensive processes like editing your photos, enhancing your photos — and believe it or not, we can do them automatically. We think that’s incredible."

"We want to show people what happens when we combine your camera with the Google cloud."

The next step is to make those photos, along with everything else posted to Google+, feel more interactive. That’s where the redesigned feed comes into play. The three-column layout makes the site more information-rich and easier to scan, while new animations make it feel more playful than before. The data center comes into play with the stream’s new "related hashtags," which harness the company’s Knowledge Graph to connect text and photo posts with millions of entities that Google recognizes.

A picture of the Eiffel Tower will connect to other pictures of the landmark, even if it is never mentioned by name. A post about Buster Posey will connect to items about the San Francisco Giants, because Google understands that he plays on the team. The idea is to make Google+ stickier by giving visitors an endless series of rabbit holes to fall down — all generated automatically, by machine.

Connecting these new features together is the company’s redesigned messaging service, which unifies instant messages, texting, and voice and video chat under the Hangouts banner. If Hangouts becomes the communications hub for a healthy subset of Google users, it becomes that much easier for the company to draw users to its other social products.

Taken together, the updates to Google+ will test the notion that brute-force machine learning can bring new life to a social network. With photos, existing software to manage and edit images leave plenty to be desired. And in demonstrations with The Verge, Google was able to take photos shot by amateurs and make them look significantly better — softening skin tones, increasing contrast, and adding depth.

But it’s also true that successful photo apps like Instagram and Hipstamatic are not first and foremost about "improving" photos — they’re more about providing fun, easy ways to modify photos and achieve various effects. Google will leave in options that let more serious photographers fiddle. But the company is emphasizing its ability to "auto awesome" your work — and it’s possible those one-click "improvements" will instead feel more like a one-size-fits-all Instagram filter you’d rather leave off most of the time.

The updates will test the notion that brute-force machine learning can bring new life to a social network

There is also room to be skeptical about the extent to which visitors to social networks will want to surf computer-generated hashtags, even if those tags are connected to Google’s Knowledge Graph. Some related tags could lead users to a treasure trove of photos and discussions; others will be likely to return a disappointing muddle. (On Twitter, where the hashtag originated, the case is more often the latter.)

Still, if the goal is to get people to spend more time using and talking about Google+, these are all sensible places to start. The network that attracts the most photos could someday be the one with the most users. It’s an approach that made major successes out of Flickr, Facebook, and Instagram. Google’s idea is to marry that vision with big data, crunching through text and photos to create a network that is broader, deeper, and more beautiful than any other. Could powerful algorithms be the secret to keeping people on Google+ longer? We’re about to find out.

Additional reporting by Dieter Bohn.

Video by Jordan Oplinger & Stephen Greenwood
Editing by: Ryan Manning & John Lagomarsino

Exclusive: Inside Hangouts, Google's big fix for its messaging mess

2013-05-15T17:58:08Z

By Ellis Hamburger and Dieter Bohn

Skydivers equipped with futuristic glasses live-broadcasted their descent into the Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco during last year’s Google I/O. Developers lined up to receive not one, but four free devices costing $300 or more. Google announced the Nexus Q, an exercise in over-produced gadgetry meant to stream music to your home theatre system.

Away from the spectacle, during a quiet “fireside chat” for a product that was not receiving any major updates, Google admitted it had a serious messaging problem — or rather, a messaging app problem. When faced with a question about Google’s fragmented communication tools, director of real-time communications Nikhyl Singhal responded quickly and honestly, as if he’d prepared for the question.

“I think we've done an incredibly poor job of servicing our users here.”

What he didn’t say was that Google had already been working on a solution for a year, and that the results of those efforts were still a year away. Since then, Google’s fragmented messaging story has become Google’s behind-the-times messaging story with apps as diverse as iMessage, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger grabbing both the spotlight and the market share.

But today, the wait is over as Google introduces a new messaging platform it’s calling Hangouts. It spans Android, iOS, Chrome, and Gmail. It’s a fusion of Google’s strengths in cloud computing, search, and mobile.

It’s also late to the game.

The story of Google Hangouts’ fractured development and eventual launch reveals quite a bit about how the company is changing from a place where tiny projects are initiated at random into one that’s being forced to organize and coordinate across products. At the new “One Google,” major projects require deep collaboration across multiple teams. Hangouts is more than just a way for Google to take on SMS. It could be a core product that stands next to Search, Gmail, and Docs, acting as a key part of Google’s suite of services. Here’s how it came to be... and why it took so long.

A history of hangouts

A history of Hangouts

Once upon a time, Google was at the forefront of the messaging game. In 2005, the company launched Talk, essentially the best experience in what was then the hottest category: instant messaging. Since then, a new category of mobile messaging has emerged: always-on chat with rich media attachments like voice memos, read receipts, and group chats. BlackBerry Messenger drove millions to buy a BlackBerry, and in recent years tiny startups like WhatsApp and established players like Facebook have grown to process billions of messages a day. In April of this year, people sent more messages using chat apps than SMS while Google sat on the sidelines with its little-used Google+ Messenger app.

Google instead spent its time building out mobile apps like Gmail, Google Now, Google Drive, and Google+, allowing its early lead to evaporate. As Singhal puts it, "When we started looking at the project we realized, and this sounds obvious in retrospect, that we built a lot of the communication products at Google without smartphones, without social networks in people’s lives."

Google’s lack of a unified messaging platform became something of a mystery, since it seemed like Google had all the necessary pieces

Talk, for example, was built to help enterprise users communicate better, Singhal says. "The notion of creating something that’s social and that’s always available wasn’t the same charter as we set out with when we created Talk." With Hangouts, Singhal says Google had to make the difficult decision to drop the very "open" XMPP standard that it helped pioneer.

Google’s lack of a unified messaging platform became something of a mystery, since it seemed like Google had all the necessary pieces. "There is a lot of code that existed that from a high-level point of view, if we just crunched it together, [it theoretically] should’ve turned into one product," says Singhal. The messaging experience was neither consistent or unified, and it wasn’t even easy to use. Google+ Messenger, a real-time communication platform that launched last year, was the first piece, but it only existed inside of Google+. Talk was another, but it was based on an old standard that predated the advent of cloud computing. Hangouts was third, a real-time video chat product embedded in Google+. Gmail had its own real-time communication team. Google Voice was the final piece, an infrequently updated relic that seemed destined for Google’s infamous spring cleaning chopping block.

Ben Eidelson, Nikhyl Singhal, Kate Cushing, and Randall Sarafa

Although Google Talk seemed like a good foundation for a messaging app, Google decided it needed to start from scratch. "We had to essentially rebuild everything," says Singhal. To create Hangouts from the guts of a decade’s worth of insular communication products, Google had to pull in engineers from across the company — many of whom were working separately on this very problem. From the outside, the company looked like a crystal palace of servers and engineers, but on the inside those same engineers weren’t working in concert, especially on messaging. "What’s funny is that most of them actually were trying to build this unified product independently," says Singhal, but separately, no one could get it done.

The watershed moment came with Google+, which proved that Google could — and should — organize a company-wide effort to implement a single idea. Years of work had shown that this core product couldn’t be created by just one team, or a handful of engineers working on their 20-percent time. "We started pulling the team together about two years ago," says Singhal. "It’s like The Avengers — we’ve had to pull together different styles and different cultures [from across Google]." The Hangouts team as it exists today is a combination of thiese pieces, a new backbone to hold together the real-time infrastructure that will power the next age of Google. Like with Google+, Singhal explains, the difficulty in messaging was "to integrate, aggregate, and crunch these different systems together."

Cloud messaging

On the surface, Hangouts is essentially a messaging app in the same vein as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. Hangouts replaces Google Talk, Google+ Messenger, and the classic Google+ Hangouts video chat.

The app — available on Android, iOS, and Chrome (but not Windows Phone or BlackBerry) — starts with text conversations. You're presented with a list of your recent conversations instead of a contact list. That's the first sign that this is more of a mobile messenger than a traditional instant messaging client, a distinction that becomes even clearer once you dive into a group chat or one-on-one conversation. Conversations get names, like chat rooms, and it's simple to add an image or one of Google’s 850 new hand-drawn emoji.

Major Google messaging moments

8/24/2005 Google Talk launches
2/7/2006 Google Talk integrated into Gmail, adds XMPP support
10/22/2008 Android launches with Google Talk app included
11/11/2008 Google Chat launches in Gmail , includes voice and video chat
3/11/2009 Google Voice launches
5/28/2009 Google Wave announced
4/15/2010 Google adds chat to Google Docs
4/28/2011 Google adds live video chat to Android
8/25/2010 Google Voice integrated into Gmail
6/28/2011 Google+ launches with video Hangouts and Huddle, an Android messenger
9/20/2011 Google launches mobile Hangouts for Android
7/30/2012 Google launches Hangouts in Gmail

Google says it's put a lot of thought into reconsidering presence, and it actually works better in Hangouts than on other apps. Instead of using "read receipts" (first popularized on BBM and coming this summer to iOS and Android) or a blanket online / offline indicator, Hangouts inserts tiny little square avatars into the chat history, called "watermarks." These watermarks show when somebody else is typing, but they also indicate how far others have read in the conversation.

The watermarks create a new sense of immediacy missing in ordinary text conversations

The watermarks create a new sense of immediacy missing from ordinary text conversations — you can see who is around and who isn't at a glance. Product manager Ben Eidelson says watermarks — like video Hangouts — reproduce the signals and cues we receive in face-to-face conversation. "It’s kind of like making eye contact," says Randall Sarafa, another product manager on Hangouts. The flip side of this new system is that you lose the more traditional "Active / Away" presence indicators that Google Talk users have grown accustomed to. It’s a hybrid of instant messaging and mobile messaging, though Hangouts will on some levels remain interoperable from Google Talk.

Hangouts keep your messages in the cloud — which isn’t exactly revolutionary, but since it's Google's cloud, there are some unique benefits. Every Hangouts conversation is stored online (and is accessible from any Hangouts app), but there is an option to toggle off history if you'd like to go off the record. The service’s Google+ integration is one of the best features in the entire product: every photo that you or a friend posts is automatically saved in a private, shared album on Google+. For example, after a year of using Hangouts, it will be easy not just to trace the text conversations your budding relationship has produced, but to track the photos you’ve shared over time. The feature is so obvious and so compelling that it could theoretically do what few Google initiatives have managed thus far — give a huge number of users a real sense of affinity with Google+.

Hangouts also benefits from Google+’s video conference tool — the "old" Hangouts. You can immediately start a video chat with up to 10 people with one tap, but voice-only conversation is a hassle since you’ll have to "mute" your video feed. Aside from audio calls, Hangouts has some other glaringly obvious missing features, like SMS. Google hasn't integrated SMS with Hangouts, either because Google doesn't want to annoy carriers or simply because it hasn't gotten around to it yet. Yet, both Apple and Facebook have proven with iOS’ Messages and Android’s Facebook Messenger that it can be tastefully done. Also, most of Google’s competitors let you broadcast messages, or embed video, voice messages, location, or any of the "stickers" that have become strangely popular. Finally, Google Voice, a product that could have been revolutionary but has instead languished, has been pulled into the Hangouts team with the promise of future integration. Singhal says that "this is the future for Google Voice," but offers no timeline for the integration of the the two products.

Aside from the missing features we’ve come to expect from new messaging platforms, Hangouts is also lacking your friends, who are using a great variety of messaging apps from WhatsApp to Kik. Hangouts hasn’t had years to cultivate hundreds of million of users worldwide like industry leader WhatsApp, which makes it a tough sell considering it’s short on features. However, most of the top apps on the scene don’t have desktop companions — a space ripe for the taking. If the masses decide that they do value a desktop app to complement their mobile one, Hangouts will be among the first to provide one, alongside Facebook Messenger and Viber. Plus, Google's size and ubiquity has proven to be an advantage when it wants to move into new areas.

Ultimately, Google has built a solid messaging app with a strong foundation that’s sure to win many converts, but it’s hard to ignore how late the company is to the game. With Facebook, Apple, BlackBerry, WhatsApp, and now many others well established in the messaging game, it’s a very crowded space. If Hangouts wants to make a stand, it will do so on the backs of Google’s 425 million Gmail users.

One Google

Google in 2013 is a very different company than the one most of us still envision. Larry Page’s ascension to CEO was the first step towards crafting a company more focused on big, integrated products. Gmail, Docs, and Maps now have a consistent look on both web and mobile, and although Google still has its share of experimental products like Glass and driverless cars, the days of the world-changing 20-percent projects are waning. The next Gmail just isn’t coming from two or three engineers on lunch break.

Hangouts takes massively powerful cloud services and marries it to a consumer product

Hangouts, like Google+, grew out of this internal shift, a revelation that was cultural as much as it was technical. Touchstone examples of the "One Google" product philosophy, they both serve as a "spine" for the company’s various products. "Google+ really was the template and the critical lesson that helped us believe that this type of project was possible," Singhal says. Hangouts may have taken years to build, but it’s devoid of the siloed approach Google has taken thus far with new products like Wave and Buzz. Hangouts takes what's best about Google — massively powerful cloud services — and marries it to a consumer product.

With Hangouts, Google has created a unifying backend for the future of its real-time products; Singhal describes it as "the single communication app that we want our users to rely on." It's a platform in an almost literal sense — something to build on that's not yet finished. In a way, Hangouts is an extension of Gmail’s product philosophy: to create a conversation between people instead of a chaotic flurry of messages. Google radically changed email in 2004 with its inclusion of "threaded conversations" in Gmail, but it never translated its success when the world went mobile. Google may have missed the boat on the mobile messaging revolution, but with its new real-time infrastructure in tow, it should be ready for the next revolution, whether it be holographic Hangouts or virtual email. "We don’t see Hangouts as a messaging product, we see it as a communication product," says product manager Kate Cushing. The only question is, when the next communication app trend hits, will Google be first or last?

Video by Jordan Oplinger & Stephen Greenwood
Edited by: Jordan Oplinger
Additional Editing: Billy Disney
Audio Mixing: John Lagomarsino

Microsoft killing off Xbox Points in favor of currency and gift cards system

2013-05-15T12:11:49Z

Microsoft is killing off its Points system that's primarily used for its Xbox console. The death of Microsoft Points has been a long time coming, and follows Microsoft's move away from the virtual currency towards cash in Windows 8. Sources familiar with Microsoft's Xbox plans have revealed to The Verge that the software maker plans to replace Points with a new gift card system.

The new gift cards will be offered in a similar way to Apple's iTunes vouchers, allowing Xbox owners to purchase true currency to be used to download content. We're told that normal cash transactions, using credit and debit cards, will also be supported. Microsoft currently offers gift cards in its retail stores, but these can only be used for purchases in brick and mortar stores. The new system will work across Microsoft's various marketplaces, including the Windows Store, Windows Phone Store, and Xbox. We understand that Microsoft is planning to unveil the system as soon as E3, with a planned launch later this year in time for the next-generation Xbox console.

Exclusive: Google readies its Spotify competitor with Universal and Sony now on board

2013-05-14T21:30:37Z

Google will unveil new subscription music services tomorrow at the Google I/O conference, sources close to the company said. Google has now signed separate licensing deals with Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment for both YouTube and Google Play, setting the stage for such an announcement, music industry sources told The Verge.

Google plans to add separate music subscription services to YouTube and Google Play, the entertainment hub for the Android operating system. Earlier this year, Fortune magazine reported that Google had already struck similar licensing agreements with Warner Music Group, the smallest of the top three record labels. But landing Universal Music and Sony gives Google access to the two largest record companies, home to such acts as Bob Dylan, Alicia Keys, Lil Wayne, Rihanna, and Jay-Z. Spokespeople from Sony and Universal declined to comment.

Google comes to these negotiations as a powerful player in music When Google rolls out the new services tomorrow at I/O, it will mean that it gets the jump on Apple, which is also trying to launch a new streaming-music service. According to reports, Google's subscription services would resemble Spotify, and offer on-demand songs that would be streamed to their PCs and mobile devices. In contrast, Apple is working on an online radio service that is said to be more akin to Pandora, a service that plays songs at random similar to traditional radio.

Google comes to these negotiations as a powerful player in music. While Google Play is still a relatively new service, insiders say YouTube is a juggernaut. The user-generated video site sees more than 800 million unique visitors a month and music videos are among the most popular fare.

When Google rolls out the new services tomorrow at I/O, it will get the jump on Apple Vivendi, Universal Music's parent company, reported first quarter earnings today, and said that revenue was up 13 percent compared to the same period a year earlier. Digital music sales have now surpassed physical at Universal, with the split being 54 percent to 46 percent, respectively. The addition of Universal's catalog, along with Sony's offerings, could allow the forthcoming Google product to have a significant impact on competitors Spotify and Rdio.

Update: The New York Times is reporting that Google’s Spotify killer won't offer a free tier for its streaming service. The paper said it wasn't clear how much Google would charge, however. Most subscription music services charge about $10 per month. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that as part of its negotiations for music subscription, YouTube is trying to get some kind of an audio-only license.

Did the future of wireless charging get decided by a coffee cup?

2013-05-08T15:15:03Z

In 2001, Wi-Fi wasn't a sure thing. Two different standards, HomeRF and Wi-Fi, were competing to be the dominant wireless networking technology. But though HomeRF had a host of supporters and its proponents argued that the technology wasn't as susceptible to interference, today mentioning the name would probably buy you a blank stare. One reason for that is the Apple iBook, the first of many laptops to integrate Wi-Fi. The other is Starbucks, which rolled out Wi-Fi on a vast scale to serve those laptops starting in 2002.

"Standards are ultimately set in a coffee shop, not in a conference room," says Daniel Schreiber, president of Powermat. He's telling The Verge about HomeRF because he believes that history is about to repeat itself. Schreiber is on the board of the Power Matters Alliance (PMA), a standards group for wireless charging — "Standards are ultimately set in a coffee shop, not a conference room."the ability to power everything from a smartphone to an automobile without a plug — and he believes his group will prevail against the competing Wireless Power Consortium (WPC) thanks to the help of that very same Starbucks.

Though the WPC is responsible for the Qi standard that appears in several recent high-end phones, it's the PMA that appears to be winning over the coffee shop. Starbucks has not only begun trialing the technology in Boston stores, it recently took a seat on the PMA board. "The next anticipated step is indeed that the rollout will be expanded significantly in the coming months," Schreiber told us. PowerKiss (which will supply 1,000 McDonalds stores in Europe) defected from the WPC to the PMA in March. And on Wednesday, The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf did the same, with plans to roll out PMA-approved wireless charging internationally after a trial this quarter in "dozens" of California stores.

But retail isn't the only component that appears to be attracted to the PMA. WiTricity, an MIT spinoff that's been developing a version of wireless charging that can work over a distance, is also announcing that it's joining the Power Matters Alliance today. While both Qi and Powermat typically use inductive charging, where a phone typically has to be placed directly against a charging pad and in a particular orientation, WiTricity has demoed resonant charging, which uses tuned electromagnetic resonators to do the same thing even at a short distance from the charging station. At a minimum, it means that devices don't have to be perfectly placed to charge. With enough power behind it, though, and a large enough coil, you could power a device hanging in the air, or charge multiple devices at the same time from a single source of power.

Though WiTricity said its solution was 18 months away back in 2009, the company's CEO Eric Giler told us that it's actually been ready for some time... only manufacturers weren't interested in such an investment without a common standard they could rally behind. "Technically, it's ready now ... practically, it needs the standard."

According to Giler, WiTricity actually approached the Wireless Power Consortium about a partnership, but the WPC shot down the idea. The company remained on the fence for some time, but when AT&T took a seat on the PMA board, that convinced WiTricity to join the Power Matters Alliance.

Allegiances are fickle, and wireless power is still young

Though it definitely feels like the PMA could be that standard, with backing from AT&T, Starbucks, and Google snowballing into more and more support, it's worth noting that none of the companies involved are necessarily exclusive to any one standards body. Some — such as Samsung — are actively playing the field. PMA board member Powermat itself used to be a member of both the WPC and another upstart, the Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP), which is working on resonant charging as well. None of the existing trials are nearly as aggressive as Starbucks' original Wi-Fi rollout back in 2002, and it's still not certain that wireless charging is here to stay at all. If or when the world agrees that it's the way to go, the key partners might defect once more. The Power Matters Alliance might have the coffee cups on its side for now, but is that a definite win? Power Matters Alliance might not yet be the Wi-Fi that defeated HomeRF, but it's certainly trying to get there.