Google today updated Google+ for Android with a slew of new features focused just on photos. You can download the new version now from Google Play.
First and foremost, the app now features non-destructive photo editing across devices. In other words, you can now start editing a photo on one device and continue on another. Here’s a scenario where this is useful: you can now back up full-resolution photos from your desktop, make some basic edits on your phone, and then add some finishing touches on your tablet.
This is possible because Google is saving all your edits in the cloud. You can, of course, revert to the original version at any time.
Next up, Google+ for Android has gained new filters and creative tools. The company explains users now have “a powerful set of tools (like crop and rotate), 1-touch filters, and Snapseed-inspired enhancements (like Drama, Retrolux, and HDR Scape).”
Last but not least, Google has added a single view for all your photos. It shows your entire photo library, regardless of whether your pictures are on your current device or backed up in the cloud. You can now also browse your photos by date: just swipe through your photos in the new All view and look for the scroll bar on the right (drag up or down to move forwards or backwards in time).
For very large photo libraries (tens of thousands of photos), the app won’t show all your photos initially. Google, however, does say it plans to support larger and larger libraries “over the next few weeks.” We’ll let you know when we find out more about the new upper limit.
Google announced today that it is organizing the first-ever Ara Developers Conference, aimed at helping developers better understand the inner workings of a smartphone and to build one themselves. The event will be held April 15 and 16 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. It’s also part of a series of conferences that Google is putting on to help support Project Ara, an initiative started from Motorola Mobility to promote free, open hardware.
There’s no word on when the next conference is scheduled, but it will be in 2014. Google intends to focus the April event on the alpha release of the Ara Module Developers Kit (MDK), an “open platform specification and reference implementation” that will help developers create their own module:
The Developers’ Conference will consist of a detailed walk-through of existing and planned features of the Ara platform, a briefing and community feedback sessions on the alpha MDK, and an announcement of a series of prize challenges for module developers.
While Project Ara is an initiative run by Google, it’s one of the things that the company kept after it sold Motorola to Lenovo in January for $2.91 billion. The project made its debut in October with the intent of doing for hardware what “the Android platform has done for software: create a vibrant third-party developer ecosystem, lower the barriers to entry, increase the pace of innovation, and substantially compress development timelines.”
Tickets will be limited for the event, with priority placed on bringing in developers. If you can’t make the event, Google says that it will be available via a live webstream.
Google today announced it won’t be blocking local Chrome for Windows extensions until May 1. The timing change is being made after some developers requested more time to get their extensions in the Chrome Web Store. As a result, Windows users have about two more months to use extensions for the company’s browser that Google hasn’t approved into its store.
The new policy does not affect off-store extensions on the Dev and Canary channels for Windows, nor all channels for Mac, Linux, and Chrome OS. The FAQ gives more details:
Users can only install extensions hosted in the Chrome Web store, except for installs via enterprise policy or developer mode.
Extensions that were previously installed, but not hosted on the Chrome Web Store will be hard-disabled (i.e the user cannot enable these extensions again), except for installs via enterprise policy or developer mode.
Google originally announced the change in November, saying they would go into effect in January. While it already went into effect for Chrome 33 beta, the stable version won’t be affected until version 34 or 35.
Yuval Brener is CEO of Carambo.la, an interactive video enrichment platform.
No matter how you look at it – bandwidth consumption, number of viewers per hour, virality – online video has taken over the Web. ComScore states that 89 million peoplein the United States are going to watch 1.2 billion online videos before the day ends!
Naturally, the cash follows and online video advertising became the fastest growing segment in the advertising world, doubling every two years. Still, it’s far from fulfilling its potential.
Shifting online display and search budgets towards online video is a major part of this astounding growth, but the market’s real upside is offline budgets. Moving dollars from offline to online is a painful and slow process. It must overcome broadcaster interests, ingrained buyers’ habits and people’s fear of change… but if anyone can do it, it’s online video.
Regardless of its sources, this kind of growth is great news for the entire online video ecosystem, including owners, publishers, advertisers and video related startups. However, it’s also the industry’s weakest link is it is the slowest to evolve.
A revolution! Or was it?
On the content side, the revolution is peeking. Original online content has taken the major steps towards TV standards in terms of production level, content formats, resolution standards, and even media buying methods.
AOL, Yahoo, YouTube, Netflix, and others have all professionally produced content according to its users’ tastes, pushing user generated content aside.
A similar revolution is occurring on the distribution side, both for users – who are now surrounded by countless screens that make videos more accessible than ever – as well as for content owners who are now syndicating their content in order to reach their audiences and stand out in this highly fragmented market.
Soon enough, offline videos will be extinct and the revolution will enter the next stage, revealing online video’s hidden potential: Interactivity.
The “1.0 monolog” experience didn’t survive in any other area of the online arena, and there’s no reason for video viewing to be the first one to do so.
The desire for interactivity is nothing new. It’s almost an obvious thing for both users and advertisers, especially within video content. Thus, why haven’t interactive videos found their place yet in the daily use?
Interactivity or nothing at all
In order for interactive videos to become an integral part of the everyday viewing experience they must consist of four aspects:
Real value for the user.
Experience that blends intelligently with the video viewing experience.
Native Ad units.
Created automatically.
If content is still king, then scale has got to be the queen – and we all know who is running the show at the palace. Automated interactivity that captures three of the other criterias is hardly a walk in the park. It’s a challenge. Unfortunately, there can’t be any shortcuts here.
If it doesn’t scale, it’s not interesting.
Meanwhile, in the advertising space…
The market is moving forward in terms of matrices – shifting from CTRs and CPMs to Cost Per Engagement and Cost Per View. In terms of technology and in the way media is being bought, however, the dominant inner-video ad formats are the same: A standalone pre-roll.
Using the offline approach (a 15/30 second spot) for the online arena was the obvious thing to do in the industry’s early days, mainly because advertisers understood it.
Not anymore.
Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer’s important announcement about cutting all of Yahoo’s mobile display ads in favor of native formats was the official tipping point for those who needed one. The evolution has (finally) found its way in the advertising space.
The future
In 2014 and beyond, inner-video advertising should be about branded content (as AOL is doing with “BeOn“). It should be about “Pull, Not Push” advertising (YouTube is half way there with the “polite/skippable Pre-Roll”), about multiple touching points with viewers across ad formats, and it must be about proximity to content.
Advertising’s deepest weakness is the distance between the viewing experience and the content experience. Bringing the two closer together through real native advertising is the key to better campaign results.
The content is finally great, the audience is already here.
2014 might just be the year in which online video advertising evolves into what it should have been from the very beginning.
Google has released the Google Now Launcher found on the Nexus 5 as a standalone app in Google Play, offering “Ok Google” hotword voice searches and a quick swipe to view contextual cards.
Other Android users have been jealous of the Nexus 5’s special Google Now features for some time, so today’s release should make a lot of people happy. It’s not for everyone, though, as the new app is only available for Nexus and Google Play edition devices.
Intrepid users have been sideloading the Google Experience Launcher onto supported devices, but now Google is officially bringing it to other Android flagships.