As we reported would happen yesterday, Google has today announced that it has closed its acquisition of Motorola Mobility, buying the Illinois-based device maker for $40 per share in cash for a total of $12.5 billion.

As widely expected, Sanjay Jha is stepping down as CEO and Dennis Woodside, Google’s former Americas head, will take the helm at Motorola Mobility, which will be operated as a standalone company. The company says the acquisition will help Google “supercharge” the Android ecosystem: while Motorola will be making devices using the platform, it will also remain open.

Page, interestingly, uses his blog post announcing the deal to focus mainly on the mobile aspects of the acquisition — Motorola also has a substantial business as a media hardware vendor, making things like set-top boxes and other equipment and technology to deliver digital video services.

“The phones in our pockets have become supercomputers that are changing the way we live,” he writes, emphasizing what the future might hold for mobile technology and likening it to Star Trek made real (and those Google Glasses really do look very Star Trek).

“It’s a great time to be in the mobile business…I’m confident Dennis [Woodhouse] and the team at Motorola will be creating the next generation of mobile devices that will improve lives for years to come,” Page writes.

In announcing the acquisition, Page describes Woodhouse as “phenomenal” at team-building, and notes under him, U.S. revenues went up to $17.5 billion from $10.8 billion in less than three years. “Dennis has always been a committed partner to our customers and I know he will be an outstanding leader of Motorola,” he wrote.

Now come more questions: what Motorola assets will Google hold on to, and what will it cut off in the new-look Motorola Mobility — and what will that say about Google’s bigger strategy as an integrated tech player? And will employees go in the process, as we have heard they will?

About six years ago, Google launched Apps for Your Domain, which, for the first time, wrapped its suite of emerging cloud products under one umbrella — as a service for businesses and the enterprise. The service combined Gmail, Google Talk, GCal, and Google Page Creator, offering the suite to businesses, non-profits, and schools for free, with no hardware or software required. Thanks to something called “the cloud.” Today, the service is better known as Google Apps and is, according to Google, being used by at least 4 million organizations, with some 40 million-plus end users.

Yet, as the Google Apps ecosystem has expanded, and its tools have become integral to the day-to-day operations of millions of businesses, many are looking for better ways to monitor, control and secure end-user access to apps like Google Docs, Sites, and Calendars. That’s why BetterCloud launched earlier this year — to provide a suite of complementary products that provide Google Apps with enhanced management and security tools for both IT admins and end users. To help it get off the ground, the New York City-based startup has raised $2.2 million in seed funding from undisclosed angel investors.

BetterCloud will use the capital to accelerate the development of its security and management tools and broaden its strategic partnerships, says founder and CEO David Politis, who left his position running the SMB group at Cloud Sherpas (one of Google’s top enterprise partners, which recently merged with GlobalOne) last year to launch the new company. At Cloud Sherpas, Politis helped hundreds of organizations transition to Google’s cloud products, and led the development of its management tools for Google Apps. Prior to Cloud Sherpas, Politis was a founding employee at Vocalocity.

When Politis left Cloud Sherpas, he brought a handful of his team members with him, along with the IP and customers database of SherpaTools, the companion app for Google Apps that offered advance IT management functions for admins and end users that he and his team helped develop. If the concept behind SherpaTools sounds familiar, that’s because it is.

Politis and team are retiring SherpaTools, replacing it with a new and improved product, which launches today in tandem with its funding announcement. The new app, called FlashPanel, is available today in exclusive beta (the first 500 readers can sign up on its landing page), with public availability in the Google Apps Marketplace slated for the summer.

FlashPanel follows the February release of BetterCloud’s first product, DomainWatch, a Google Apps security tool for domains, created to ensure greater visibility and control for IT admins over their users’ activity. Politis says that he thinks the funding represents a validation of the maturity of the Google Apps ecosystem, and, in turn, the need for organizations to get better ways to make the most of Google’s products, both in security and management for admins and end users.

So what is FlashPanel? The management tool offers IT admins comprehensive domain management from one dashboard, giving them access to info on users, groups, and organizational units, Google Docs quota usage, as well as a chart profiling active, suspended, and unused seats.

BetterCloud also wants to provide granular management, as some small companies may not use CRM tools, so the suite offers shared contact management, which admins can use to disseminate information to individual users and sync with their mobile devices, add users to new groups, shuffle them around, remove them, or back up inboxes — which gives them a standard template to make it easier for onboarding new employees and deprovisioning those who’ve left.

FlashPanel also offers email signature standardization so that businesses can create a unified brand image for their employees, and its so-called “App Butler,” which users can enable via Google Chat to retrieve company directory contact info on-demand or broadcast company-wide events.

In addition, the suite includes scheduled and on-demand scans of domain activity, stats, email inbox monitoring, and delegation, as well as a product called Google Gooru, which offer companies training videos on each new Google Apps feature as they’re released, making it easier for admins to get employees using new features without the hassle of having to create their own or hold company-wide onboarding sessions.

As the Google Apps ecosystem continues to grow and develops new products and services around Vault, Chromebooks, and Android, BetterCloud wants to be the end-to-end service that provides the best management tools — for everything from domains and groups to reporting, security and compliance — for Google’s enterprise suite.

For more on BetterCloud, check ‘em out at home here.

Anybeat, a social network that launched last year as a kind of “anti-Facebook” to meet people you don’t already know, is getting bought by another company and is shutting down. The company posted a message to its users a few hours ago noting that it would be closing up operations in two weeks.

The service, which launched as a beta in September 2011 (we offered invites here), was founded by Dmitry Shapiro, who had also founded Veoh and at one point had been the CTO of MySpace. It’s been reported that he is moving to Google to head up Google +.

Anybeat has posted news of the shutdown on its own page in Anybeat.

In the note, Anybeat says that it is getting purchased by another company — it doesn’t say who — and that new owner will be “repurposing it to address a different type of community, and will not be operating Anybeat as is.” It has also offered a link to a Google Group that will let users stay in touch.

It’s not clear how many users Anybeat picked up in its short life, but if you consider that Facebook now has 901 million active subscribers, that’s a pretty high bar to hit for any social network to consider itself as having reached a critical mass.

Anybeat’s unique selling point was its option of anonymity — once something that seemed part and parcel of online personalities, but more recently — not least because of Facebook — replaced by full-on real name usage as the norm for many people. It’s unclear whether any of what Anybeat was doing will be carried over into whatever comes next.

We are contacting Google and Dmitry to ask about the reports of his career move to Google +, and to ask for more details about who has bought the company. If reports of Shapiro’s move are true, could it be Google itself? Is that why the company is suggesting a Google Group to carry on relationships post-Anybeat? It would seem very ironic given that the note below says “I don’t do Google.” In the meantime, this is the note that Anybeat has posted to users:

Google today announced its latest update for Google Maps for Android with support for Google Offers. One interesting piece of this announcement that stood out was that Google Maps for Android users now get access to free Google Offers like a free coffee or dessert. Turns out, that’s actually just a small part of a wider update to Google Offers. Merchants across the U.S. – including towns where Google’s pre-paid offers haven’t launched yet – can now use a new self-service interface to create these free offers.

We talked to Google Offers’ director of product management Eric Rosenblum about these changes earlier today. According to Rosenblum, there are three major pieces to today’s announcement: a new way for users to use Offers, a new way for merchants to use it, and expanded distribution of offers through Maps for Android.

Until now, Google and most of its competitors in this market have focused on pre-paid offers. With this new free offering, Google wants to give merchants more opportunities to get new customers to their stores. Store owners can use a new self-service interface to set specific times for when and how long an offer should be valid. This new interface also gives merchants access to stock photography and other tools to fine-tune their messages. The coupons can be for money off, a percentage discount or a free product or gift.

This is pretty similar to what Groupon is doing with Groupon Now, the difference being that this is for free coupons and not for pre-paid offers. As Rosenblum put it, this is basically a way to give shoppers “a gentle nudge” to come and try out a new store, coffee shop or restaurant.

For potential customers, this means that they can now use the Google Maps for Android app (no word on whether this feature will come to other platforms anytime soon) to find these new offers and save them. For users who opt in to this, the app will also alert them whenever there’s a nearby offer.

Google just launched an update for Google Maps for Android that brings three interesting new features to the app: integration with Google Offers, support for Google Business Photos and indoor walking directions.

With the new Google Offers integration, Android users will now be able to see which nearby stores currently offer deals. This, says Google, includes both offers that can be purchased, as well as “free” offers that are available immediately. Users can also opt-in to receive notifications when there are offers near them. Google, it is worth noting, also offers a dedicated Google Offers app for Android as well.

The Google Maps for Android app now also lets users in the U.S. and Japan (the two countries where venue owners can already upload their own indoor maps) get indoor walking directions. This is clearly an area Google has been working on for a while. Earlier this year, the company, for example, launched an Android app that allows venue owners to help Google improve its indoor location accuracy.

The app now also features support for Google Business Photos (a.k.a. Indoor Street View). With this feature, users can get access to 360-degree panoramic images from inside local stores and restaurants. These images are now highlighted on every participating business’s Place page in Google Maps for Android.

In September 2010, I wrote a post that ignited an absolute shitstorm around these parts. “Shitstorm” in this case meaning a post with a thousand comments, the majority of which were spewed up by rabid Android fanatics. The title of that post:

Is Android Surging Only Because Apple Is Letting It?

At the time, we were in the midst of a massive Android surge to the top of the smartphone ecosystem food chain. This was happening all around the world, but the focus of this particular post was the U.S. market. Based on some comments made by developer David Beach at the time, I wondered if, as the title suggested, Android was only doing so well in the U.S. because the iPhone was still only available on one carrier, AT&T?

It’s time to revisit that thought because there’s now absolutely no question that this was the case. There’s now data to back it up. What’s more, despite what some surveys suggest, this trend may have fully reversed itself.

Over the past few days, both comScore and NPD have put out data showing that Android still has a healthy hold on the U.S. smartphone market with their best market share numbers yet. According to comScore, Android controls 51 percent of the market. According to NPD, it’s more like 61 percent.

For comparison, Apple is the number two player with 30.7 percent of the market according to comScore, and 29 percent according to NPD.

On the surface, there’s one big glaring problem with these numbers. Actual sales data from the three largest carriers in the U.S. doesn’t seem to back up the comScore and NPD numbers. At all.

In the last quarter, the iPhone accounted for 78 percent of all smartphones sold through AT&T. On Verizon, the iPhone accounted for 51 percent of all smartphones sold. Sprint didn’t report their total smartphone sales numbers, only iPhone sales numbers, but estimates peg the iPhone percentage around 60 percent. The iPhone is not (yet) sold on the nation’s fourth largest carrier, T-Mobile.

That’s 51 percent of all smartphones sold on the nation’s largest carrier (Verizon). 78 percent of all smartphone sold on the nation’s number two carrier (AT&T). And 60 percent of all smartphones sold on the nation’s number three carrier (Sprint). Jay Yarow of Business Insider did the math: all together, the iPhone accounted for 63 percent of the smartphone sales in the past quarter on the big three carriers. The 63 percent number is close to the 59 percent estimated by Raymond James analyst Tavis McCourt last week, as reported by Eric Savitz for Forbes.

And if you believe the Yankee Group, the big three carriers account for roughly 80 percent of the overall U.S. smartphone market. This equates to almost exactly 50 percent of the overall smartphone market in the U.S. for Apple.

It’s hard to see how Android could control 61 percent of the market when there’s only 50 percent to spare after the actual numbers are calculated. Maybe Android is huge with undocumented workers. Undocumented workers who love taking surveys, mind you. But I digress…

And, of course, there are other smartphones out there from RIM, Microsoft, Nokia, and the like. Even giving Android the other 50 percent of the market would mean all of the other players equal zero percent. (Sadly, perhaps not that far off, actually.)

ComScore at least has some wiggle room here. They don’t actually measure phone sales quarter to quarter, but overall market usage. So it’s certainly possible that after a few years of Android sales, they do still control the majority of the U.S. smartphone market. But their numbers get sticky when you look quarter-to-quarter and see that Android’s market share increased nearly four time more than the iPhone’s market share this past quarter. Again, that doesn’t sound right when the iPhone accounted for 63 percent of all smartphones sold on the big three carriers.

When I brought this point up a few days ago, comScore was quick with an answer. They told me that amongst the big three carriers, the iPhone subscriber growth actually did outpace Android subscriber growth, 13 percent to 11 percent. It’s just that overall Android growth from the remaining carriers (meaning T-Mobile and the regional carriers) more than wiped out that difference.

First of all, 13 percent (iPhone) versus 11 percent (Android) growth on the big three carriers still doesn’t sound right if the iPhone accounted for 63 percent of all sales last quarter. Second, if the big three do in fact make up about 80 percent of the overall market, how did the remaining 20 percent tilt the scales 4x in favor of Android (in terms of market share growth quarter to quarter)? It doesn’t make sense.

And then you look at NPD’s numbers. Yarow demolished those earlier. And sure enough, NPD reached out right away with clarifications.

Here’s the real issue: this rapid swing in favor of the iPhone seems to have exposed some serious flaws in the way these market analysts get their data. They’re hiding behind vague technicalities on how their numbers could be what they say, but they still don’t add up. Their problem is that we have actual numbers from the three largest carriers in the U.S., all of which are finally selling the iPhone and boasting about those numbers because they’re huge.

So how do the other guys get their numbers?

Surveys.

In comScore’s case, their MobiLens data comes from “an intelligent online survey of a nationally representative sample of mobile subscribers age 13 and older”. They don’t disclose the number of people surveyed, but you can bet it’s not a massive number. In NPD’s case, they survey 12,811 people.

Which numbers do you trust? Millions upon millions of actual sales reported in a legal manner by public companies or surveys of thousands of people?

Further, as Ethan Kaplan points out, “NPD and the like are incentive based surveys so naturally skew a certain way. Teens, college students, etc.” Several others have made this point over the past few days. The numbers comScore and NPD use in their statistically small surveys are likely skewed for a number of reasons. And again, now we have actual sales data that heavily suggests that’s the case.

By now, I probably have the Android fanatics really upset, so let’s throw out all these rational numbers and instead continue on with the dream that Android is “winning” in the U.S. Not winning in revenue or profit mind you — you know, things that actually matter for business, and things which Android will likely never be winning in any sense of the word — but winning in terms of overall market share. If you want to ignore all the above information and insist that Android is still winning there, that’s fine. But let’s jump back to the beginning of this post.

Again, the argument made in September 2010 was that Android was winning in market share in the U.S. because Apple was letting it win by only making the iPhone available on AT&T’s network. If Android still does control half to two-thirds of the market as the surveys suggest, what does it mean that on the three carriers where the iPhone is available, Apple now controls over 60 percent of these markets on a quarterly basis? (Again, this is fact backed up by actual sales numbers.)

It means that Android was/is winning in market share because Apple was/is allowing it to.

Android was previously the top smartphone OS for both Verizon and Sprint. But that was only because the iPhone was not available on either network until last year. When it became available, it quickly shot to the top. One type of phone outsold hundreds of other models combined. That’s pretty insane.

And it doesn’t speak well for the future of Android’s market share, survey or not. At least not in the U.S. (the rest of the world is more complicated for many other reasons). What if Apple finally puts the iPhone on T-Mobile later this year? Given what we now know — again, from actual data — is there any question that it becomes the top smartphone there? What about the other, smaller regional carriers? That’s already starting to happen.

Android’s only hope is to actually have a phone, or a set of phones, that are more appealing to consumers than the iPhone. But that hasn’t happened in the past four years, so what makes us think that will change this year? Or next year? All Apple has to do is say the word and they can win the market share battle in this country.

Actually, again, if you consider the numbers above, it sure looks like they already have won that battle.

Google’s sale of a previously purchased arm of the company this morning, 3D modeling software SketchUp to Trimble, isn’t just something it does “every now and again”. It’s actually Google’s first divestment ever, according to two sources, and we’re hearing the search giant made a profit, as it sold SketchUp for more than it bought it for back in 2006.

This could signal a sea change in how Larry Page executes his vision for a leaner, more focused Google. The company frequently shuts down extraneous products, but that requires redistribution of their team members internally. If it’s now willing to sell them instead, Google could streamline around the theme of making user’ lives more convenient, while making some money at the same time.

It wasn’t that SketchUp wasn’t working. It had 30 million activations since joining Google as part of @Last Software in March 2006. But it just didn’t fit with the direction Google is heading in. It’s a relatively niche product for architects and the construction industry, game developers, and film makers. It doesn’t fit with last years theme of inherently social product that could be tied to Google+, or this years plan to simplify everyone’s lives.

So rather than sink it in the deadpool, Google sold it to someone that can actually use — Trimble, a mapping, surveying, and navigation equipment company. Analysts speculated that Google paid $45 million for SketchUp in 2006. As Trimble called the acquisition of the product “immaterial”, and therefore less than 5% of its annual revenue, it couldn’t have paid more that $90 million for it. That would mean Google could have made up to $45 million in profit on the sale, though its likely closer to a few million.

Early this year Google shut down its photo editor Picnik and open sourced its Android stargazing app Google Sky Map. If the company had to do it again, maybe it’d sell them off instead.

This strategy of divesting successful but outlying products meshes with why we’ve heard Google didn’t buy Instagram. While initially vaguely interested in buying the photo sharing service, we hear Google walked away before talks went past the coffee table stage. That’s because buying Instagram for a high price just to fracture focus by running it independently didn’t align with Page’s game plan.

I often hear that headcount bloat and disorganization in the ballooning Google disgruntles employees and makes them flee for startups. The inefficient bureaucracy, lost transition time , and expensive counter-offers it has to make to get talent to stay are running up costs for Google while slowing it down. While no one wants to see their co-workers shipped out of the Googleplex, it may be wise for Google to sell the meat instead of just trimming the fat.

[Additional reporting by Alexia Tsosis and Rip Empson]

Larry Page's tenure as Googler-in-chief has heralded the death of many ambitious experiments, but even he refuses to kill the self-driving car. His project head, Anthony Levandowski, has now asked the car makers of Detroit to sign up with Mountain View for hardware testing, saying that if driverless cars are not ready by the next decade, then it's "shame on us as engineers." There's still some way to go before the tech is road-worthy, but Google is already working with insurers to work out how your car is going to handle making that call to Geico when things go wrong.

Continue reading Google asks car makers 'Ullo John, wanna self-driving motor?'

Google asks car makers 'Ullo John, wanna self-driving motor?' originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 26 Apr 2012 06:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Right now there’s a cutthroat battle between social marketing platforms to represent the world’s biggest brands. In hopes of seducing dollars from offline and clients from competitors, social marketing platform FanBridge has just hired away Buddy Media’s GM of lifestyle brands David Dowd. Previously the head of branded content biz dev for Google, his experience courting fashion, retail, luxury and other companies there and at Buddy Media will give him the edge as FanBridge’s new VP of brands.

Selling big brands on the future is tough. There’s plenty of social skeptics still clinging to TV. Many companies aren’t shifting their whole marketing budgets to digital, but that’s the direction the money is flowing. Be it Buddy Media, FanBridge, or their many competitors, those who can lock down trend-setting clients and get positioned for the coming wave will surf their way to multi-million dollar contracts.

For background, FanBridge powers digital brand promotion with custom landing pages, branded apps for social network Pages, and an email marketing platform. Dowd will be managing the latter, FanBridge’s Social Digest, which lets web celebs and brands automatically send an email of their top content like photos and videos to their email list each week. Dowd is tasked with getting more brands using the product, and paying for ad space on the digests sent by other clients that reach 8 million people.

“Branded entertainment is a massive, $51 billion market” says Dowd. He’s not the only one who sees it, judging by the massive rounds social marketing platforms have been raising. Buddy Media raised a $54 million Series B, Vitrue took a $17 million Series C, Wildfire snagged a $10 million Series B, and thisMoment pulled in a $7.3 million Series A. In comparison, the $2 million FanBridge raised a year ago seems small, but it was already cash-flow positive at the time. All these companies are constantly vying to sign “The World’s Top 10/100/1000 Brands”, so expect more poaching of people like Dowd that come packing direct relationships with sought-after clients.

Blogs and content sites are only willing to give up valuable real estate and clutter themselves with social sharing buttons if they get ample referral traffic in return. That’s the big problem with the Google+ Share button that launched today with no launch partners or live examples of it in use. The embeddable button for posting webpages to the Google+ news feed with an optional comment is going to struggle for installs unless Google can prove it drives page views.

After flops like the Google Buzz and +1 buttons, and plenty of competition, it’s going to be a tough sell. In the end, it could backfire, sidestepping the bullshit registered user counts Google cites as awesome growth and exposing the social network as a place few people spend time. And it’s all kind of sad because the G+ Share button could be the answer to the Google+ content drought.

The G+ Share button and +1 button are almost identical so lets clear up how they work. One-click the +1 button and a public recommendation for the page shows up in search results for it, and it appears in the +1s section of your G+ profile. Add a comment or click Share and select an audience when you +1 something and a full story will appear in the G+ news feeds of those you shared to who’ve circled you as well.

Meanwhile, the Share button isn’t public by default. It requires an initial click to bring up the share prompt and comment box, and a second click to share that Page to the G+ feed. So really, the +1 button is more versatile and powerful, but also public and I bet lots of people one-clicked it thinking they were sharing to their feed as if they clicked a Like button.

I have Google+, and I don’t mind using the site. While I frequently criticize Google’s execution of its social strategy, I think there’s big potential for the G+ “macronetwork” concept where you can share with people you have very different relationships with from one place. But without plenty of friends actively sharing content on G+ or tagging me in photos, I rarely visit. This worsens the draught since without its Share and +1 buttons there’s no way to post to Google+ without visiting. That’s because Google+ has purposefully refused to open a publishing API to let people post through third-party apps, as Google+ director Vic Gundotra fears third-parties could overrun the unfiltered stream.

By being more familiar than +1 and allowing me to share without visiting, the G+ Share button could inject great content into Google+. But first it needs widespread installation which requires a proper launch. That’s not what it got today, totally overshadowed by the launch of Google Drive and Apple’s earnings announcement.

The lack of launch partners was especially shortsighted. Facebook recently released its Subscribe button with Forbes, MSNBC, TODAY.com and TechCrunch, while Spotify’s Play button appeared on The Huffington Post (owned by AOL, as is TechCrunch), Rolling Stone, and The Guardian. How hard would it have been to scratch the back of some popular sites and get G+ Share buttons installed on them for today so as to inspire others to install and give users a real way to try it?

Facebook and Twitter have peppered the world with their sharing buttons, turning the entire web into content feeders for their networks. Pinterest has its own button too. However, all these networks had significant engagement, not just user counts, when they launched their buttons. In exchange for the publicity and content, they send monetizable traffic back to sites. TechCrunch actually removed our Google Buzz button long before it was scrapped by Google because it wasn’t sending us any traffic.

Now we’re going to get a real pulse check of Google+. If it doesn’t drive traffic, no one will install it, and those that do will remove. Google is running up against a serious chicken-and-egg problem here, and could end up with that egg on its face.