Google TV, Android 2.2, Chrome Web Store Lead Googles Latest Ventures

by Clint Boulton

More than 5,000 developers showed up at Google’s third annual I/O show.

This year’s Google Wave, Google TV is a sweeping effort to marry Web surfing with television consumption. The service is based on Android; users access it through Google Chrome. Sony is building special TVs and Blu-ray players for the service, while Logitech is building companion boxes and special remote controls. These machines are powered by Intel Atom system-on-a-chip sets. Best Buy will sell them, probably this fall in time for the holiday season.

Also known as Froyo for frozen yogurt, Android 2.2 is really fast in tests on stage at I/O. The software also features better voice recognition, enterprise-class features and other utilities to make programmers happy to write apps for it. Expect smartphones on the new build from HTC and others later this year.

Google Wave is now part of Google Labs and users can navigate to wave.google.com and sign in with their Google account. Wave is also now officially part of Google Apps, so Google Apps administrators can opt in to enable Google Wave free for their Google Apps Standard, Premier and Education edition users through the Labs tab in Google Apps.

Google plans to sell Web applications through its Chrome Web Store later this year.

Look out Amazon S3, Google wants your storage customers. Google Storage for Developers is a cloud service built on Google’s storage and networking infrastructure. In response, Amazon trimmed its S3 costs by one-third.

Google’s mobile programmers rolled out this Latitude API, hoping developers will build interesting apps that leverage users’ locations. Developers could build apps or services that alert users to potential fraud of their credit card accounts when a purchase is made from a location remote from the card holder.

We’re more skeptical about this Google Buzz API, given Google Buzz’s early privacy snafus. But kudos to Google for providing an alternative to Facebook Connect.

Googles vice president of Engineering absolutely rips Apple and its CEO Steve Jobs in this YouTube clip/a>. It’s well worth the 10 minutes of your time. Google vs. Apple is to the mobile market what the Microsoft vs. Apple was to the desktop space. The stakes are high. This alone was big news.

Why is this forthcoming smartphone featured here? Sit down for this. Every I/O attendee left with a free one yesterday. Jealous? Us, too.