By Alistair Barr
Google Inc. showcased new offerings Thursday designed to embed
the Internet giant more deeply into users' lives.
At its annual developers' conference, Google unveiled a
mobile-payment system to tie people closer to its Android
smartphones, previewed a new operating system for connected
devices, launched a service to host photos and videos on Google's
computers and highlighted technology to worm itself deeper into
mobile apps.
"We want to make sure we leave no one behind," Google product
chief Sundar Pichai told more than 1,000 developers at the I/O
conference in San Francisco.
Google began in the late 1990s as a search engine harvesting
information from websites and presenting relevant answers to
queries. That helped build the world's largest digital advertising
money machine. But the growing use of smartphones, and apps, has
forced Google to adapt.
Its main strategy is to extend Android from phones to as many
devices as possible. Mr. Pichai said Android now runs on more than
4,000 distinct devices, from tablet computers to watches, car
dashboards and TVs.
"Google wants to be part of any device or service that can
benefit from being smarter through technology," said Jan Dawson, an
analyst at Jackdaw Research.
The approach will put Google at the heart of many products, but
Mr. Dawson said it is unclear how Google will make money from many
of its new endeavors. Despite a number of announcements, there was
no blockbuster new product Thursday. Google shares dipped slightly
during Thursday trading, leaving them down 2% over the past year,
while Apple Inc. shares have risen 50% and Facebook Inc. has gained
30%. Google shares closed down 7 cents to $554.18 Thursday.
During his keynote address, Mr. Pichai unveiled a new operating
system, called Brillo, and a communication standard called Weave to
connect everyday devices and objects to the Internet.
Brillo is a stripped-down version of the Android
mobile-operating system designed to run using little power. Weave
will help devices talk to each other using a common language, so a
smartphone can lock or unlock a "smart" door lock, for example.
Brillo and Weave will be released by the end of 2015, Mr. Pichai
said.
Google has always given away its Android operating system and
tried to make money indirectly through advertising and app
purchases. Jackdaw's Mr. Dawson expects that to be true for Brillo
as well.
Google also unveiled a new mobile-payment system called Android
Pay that will let Android phone users pay with their devices in
more than 700,000 U.S. stores. An updated version of Android, due
to be released later this year, will support fingerprint scans for
users to authenticate purchases.
Google sees the service as a must-have feature for smartphones
in part to keep pace with Apple's similar Apple Pay, introduced
last year.
Apple takes a cut of transactions from credit-card and
debit-card issuers. It is unclear how Google will get paid for
Android Pay. An executive and a spokeswoman at the company said
Thursday that the goal is to make Android phones more useful and
declined further comment.
Another potentially popular product with an unclear path to
revenue emerged Thursday in Google Photos, a way of storing and
organizing photos and videos in Google's data centers. Google said
it will offer unlimited free storage, though large images will be
compressed when stored.
Van Baker, an analyst at research firm Gartner, said Photos is
part of a long-term Google strategy to use its computing expertise
to gather more data.
More than a decade ago, Google launched Gmail as a free email
service with unlimited storage, gaining hundreds of millions of
users. The company now sells ads based on the content in those
messages. Mr. Baker expects Google to follow a similar approach
with Photos, gaining as many users as possible, then using its
computing power to analyze information and devise ways to generate
revenue.
"The value of the data is worth more to Google than the cost of
the storage," Mr. Baker said. "They can extract activities that
people like to do, places they like to go, what they like to
eat."
One place Google has struggled to get information is within
mobile apps, which its computers can't crawl and index like
websites. Thursday, Google threw many of its most-prized assets at
the challenge.
The most promising example, according to Mr. Baker, was a new
version of Google's digital assistant, known as Google Now. This
uses the company's machine-learning capabilities and computing
power to automatically suggest relevant information to users.
Google is expanding this technology to work inside mobile apps.
In messaging and email apps, for example, Google Now will recommend
content from other apps that are relevant to what is being
discussed.
App developers have to agree to have their apps indexed by
Google for these features to work, a Google executive said at the
conference.
Write to Alistair Barr at alistair.barr@wsj.com
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