Want to know what the Googlephone fuss is about? WhatsOpen.com, the first app to be built for Googlephones, has just launched in beta. The site looks much like the screenshots leaked to Valleywag last month: It’s a local search engine which mashes up Google Maps with a directory of store’s operating hours. Want a late-night coffee, or beer at 3 a.m.? WhatsOpen tells you which stores to go to. Here’s a screenshot of the search results.

If you sign up for WhatsOpen’s beta, you can get access to the software it built with Google’s Android OS, the software brains behind your Googlephone. Oh, what’s that? You don’t have a Googlephone, you say? Pity.

Which raises the question: How did WhatsOpen build this app in the first place? It started with a chance encounter in October with Google cofounder Sergey Brin at the Web 2.0 Summit. Brin was overheard to tell WhatsOpen’s founders to keep plans for the site quiet.

Why the secrecy? Because Google was getting ready to launch Android, and WhatsOpen seems to have been a perfect test for the software. A lucky break for a young startup.

Here’s what’s disturbing about WhatsOpen’s preferential access: It says that Google plays favorites. While other developers complain about the buggy software development kit Google has provided, WhatsOpen has experienced smooth sailing. Could that be because it’s getting a little help from powerful friends at Google?

Even so, Jason Aaron and the other team members at WhatsOpen aren’t betting everything on Sergey’s favor. The app is also available for Apple’s iPhone — a device which, unlike the Googlephone, can actually be found in consumers’ hands today.

They were going to CHANGE EVERYTHING. Whoops. presenting five biggest technology disappointments of the past year. No, not Vista and the Kindle — you didn’t expect anything there.

5. Apple TV

Cable TV was going to be dead by Christmas. Instead, Forrester Research reversed its bullish forecast, placing Apple TV behind Jam Packs for GarageBand.

4. Googlephone

Valleywag editor Owen “Wrongway” Thomas repeatedly insisted all year that there was no Googlephone. He was almost right: Google’s only built a phone software platform, one which launched with no killer apps or interface innovations. Don’t drop your iPhone just yet.

3. Facebook ads

“Once every hundred years, media changes,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg declared moments before unveiling an overhyped ad system for broadcasting your purchases to your friends’ Facebook pages. Even if Zuckerberg proves bizarrely right about media, he picked the wrong day. A hundred years from now, the history books — or whatever replaces them –will talk about YouTube instead.

2. DRM-free music

Cory Doctorow is finally happy, but face it: DRM-restricted music and video files weren’t the repression of personal freedom that evangelists like Doctorow made them out to be. They’re merely irritating when they don’t play. Copyright crusaders are like medical marijuana advocates: You can’t argue with them in theory, but in practice you know what they really want is the right to party hearty — or in this case, to download music not just free of DRM, but free of charge.

1. Tesla Roadster

The all-electric sports car really would change the mass public’s attitude toward electrics. If only it would hit the road. The company missed its promised ship dates, and genius founder Martin Eberhard has been ousted. To be clear, Tesla’s electric motors work just fine. Gossip says that Tesla’s electric motor is so strong that it breaks its gearbox. The company has acknowledged that its custom-made two-speed transmissions have proved a problem.

Special Achievement Award: Pownce

Never confuse celebrity with software. Videogenic Digg founder Kevin Rose announced a new company that would do something radically different. Lead developer Leah Culver topped an online beauty contest, despite posting dubious integer-rounding code to her blog. But to date, I still don’t even know what Pownce is — NO DON’T TELL ME LA LA LA LA NOT LISTENING! Uncov writer Ted Dziuba explains it for me. As for Pownce’s cyberlebrity status, Ted adds, “their daily traffic is now less than 2girsl1cup.”

(Illustration by Uncov. Photo of Google Android by Mobile magazine. Photo of Leah Culver by Brian Solis)

Today’s San Francisco Chronicle has more details on the upcoming wedding of Google founder Larry Page and his girlfriend Lucy Southworth. The Chronicle confirms that it will be happening the weekend of December 8, but they can’t seem to find the location. As we told you earlier this month, it’s taking place on Necker Island, the Caribbean hideaway owned by Virgin billionaire Richard Branson. Branson, naturally, is expected to attend the event, along with San Francisco god-mayor Gavin Newsom and “many current and former Google employees” (Perhaps ex-girlfriend Marissa Mayer?). One person, though, is skipping the bash.

That’s former U.S. Vice President and current Google “senior advisor” Al Gore, who has a previous engagement in Oslo, Norway that weekend — he’s receiving the Nobel Peace Prize. (”Larry Page allowed that, on the list of excuses, that was acceptable,” Gore told the Chronicle.) Gore is hoping to attend via videoconferencing, destroying any pretense of this being a high-society soirée –Necker’s going to be Nerd Island for the weekend.

Source:Valleywag

The slight case of sniffles and coughs making the rounds in SF has been dubbed the Woz Cold. Urban legend has it that Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak appeared to introduce Fake Steve blogger Dan Lyons on the Peninsula a week ago despite a nagging head and/or chest cold, depending on who you ask. Woz shook hands and buddied up for photos at the event. Now we’re all snuffling and Apple’s stock is … oh wait, it’s back near 170. Never mind.

Source:Valleywag

“I don’t know of a single developer who has had his/her hands on Android,” says Valleywag honorary staffer Robert Scoble, referring to the open-source software development kit for Google’s new phone platform. I don’t know of any, either. That’s odd, because ponytailed hackers usually make it a point to tell me about these things as a way to rub their snob status in the face of the hated, hated mainstream media. Sorry, where was I? Oh yeah: If you’re actually working with Android code and aren’t at Google, drop me a line.

GigaOm head Om Malik and TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington were supposed to lead a talk on the “Cult of Blogging” today at some blog conference in Las Vegas. Neither showed. Om, apparently called in sick, while Arrington, according to Leo Laporte, “forgot” about his commitment. The replacement? A chat with Justine Ezarik, who hosts a lifecasting videoblog under the name iJustine. For attendees who were disappointed by the switch, we offer one consolation: The comely vide blogger is far, far easier on the eyes than Arrington or Malik. Hail the new cult leader! (Photo by b_d_solis)

Source:Valleywag

Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr are attempting to eliminate stupid comments from the Web with the open-source project StupidFilter. On first mention, it sounds great. We wish there was a StupidFilter for blog posts and magazine articles too. On looking into it, though, we realized that what we really need is a StupidFilter for startups like this.

The StupidFilter is literally stupid. The creators concede there is not sufficient artificial intelligence to filter stupidity. The filter focuses on “comments with too much or too little capitalization, too many text-message abbreviations, excessive use of “LOL,” exclamation points, and so on.” In other words, it’s not a stupid filter. It’s an automated grammar Nazi.

The StupidFilter’s rules are arbitrary. One of the filter’s creators provides this example:

The clueless tend to repeat consonants: “This video is amazinggggg!!!” By comparison, says Ortiz, “when you repeat a vowel, you’re being sarcastic — ‘Yeaaaaaah.’”

Yeaaaaaah.

The StupidFilter’s creator posts stupid content. George Ortiz’s own webssite describes himself as a “Badass MC.” Links on the page include: “My Friends And I Are Pretty Good Cooks, “My Pretty Okay Photography,” and “Trust Me, I’m A Professional” — that last one is for his resume.

The StupidFilter encourages stupid comments that sound smart. When the filter encounters a stupid comment, it warns the poster and requests that they restate their comment. Telling a commenter “This comment is more or less unintelligible. Please try to restate it” will merely encourage comments that are even stupider, but phrased grammatically.

The utopian notion here, of course, is that we can somehow make the Internet a smarter place than the offline world. Right. That dream died when AOL loosed its users on the Internet back in the ’90s. The endeavor is, on its face, stupid. We’ll stick with our system: Force commenters to audition, and then ban them on the first sign of stupidity.

Source:Valleywag

I I’ve I I I me I

Fun Fact: Comedy writer and failed airport novelist John C. Dvorak did not invent the Dvorak keyboard.

Remember WhatsOpen.com, the stealth search startup that piqued Google cofounder Sergey Brin’s interest last month? Brin was so intrigued he told the founders to keep the company hush-hush. Now, however, a source has leaked screenshots of WhatsOpen’s secret project. The company has a Web application which shows users nearby stores and their operating hours — “what’s open.” But I’m told by a source that WhatsOpen has also written the first wireless app for Google’s new Android operating system. (You may know Android better as the software behind the still-mythical Googlephone.) Demo screenshots after the jump.

galleryPost(’whatsopenscreenshots’, 6, ‘Exclusive screenshots of first Googlephone app’);

Source:Valleywag

Micron, a memory-chip manufacturer, had a bad year. The company lost millions of dollars and laid off over 1,000 employees. Because of this, CEO Steve Appleton turned down his yearly bonus. Extraordinary? Perhaps. We suspect he’ll do alright. He made $8.6 million from his base pay, stock awards and retirement package. That would be plenty of money to live comfortably in Silicon Valley — and it’s a fortune in Idaho, where Micron is headquartered.

Source:Valleywag

Do electric sheep dream of Androids? The announcement of Google’s gadgetless phone alliance yesterday started the rumors flying: Journalists already have them! Scoble didn’t get one! Well, true, he didn’t. But the credible rumor is that the only lucky people who’ve got them are developers. Java developers. The most elitist, snotty kind of developers, Java coders are to the Valley what bisexual Green Party bicycle activists are to San Francisco. Which seems dumb, given how easy Java is compared to, say, C back before they put the plus-plus training wheels on it. Anyway, the point is that if you don’t already have a Googlephone, you aren’t going to get one.

Time has named Apple’s iPhone its invention of the year. The iPhone is a big deal, but not for any of the reasonsTime cites. The nonrelease of the Googlephone just highlights what Apple gets about consumers, and what Google doesn’t. Apple knows how to design not just gadgets, but the businesses that go around them. And as a result, I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple is worth more than Google within two years.

The iPhone is clearly a success, having sold 1.2 million units in the three months since launch. That 250,000 of those phones were bought to be unlocked shows the huge demand for the phone overseas and among U.S. users who don’t want to switch to AT&T. Apple has publicly stated that it wants to sell 10 million units in calendar year 2008. In 2009? 50 million, according to leaked numbers. That’s less than 5 percent of the total global cell phone market — a legitimate goal, I suspect, and yet a huge business: $15 billion just from hardware sales alone.

Unlike most phonemakers, which only get paid when they sell phones, at steep discounts, to wireless carriers, Apple has set up three separate revenue streams for its iPhone platform.

First, Apple makes a profit when the phone is sold — about $200. Second, it takes a hefty chunk of subscription revenue from the carrier — $18 a month, or $432 over two years. Third, Apple takes a cut from music and television shows sold through the iTunes Store — and, possibly, it will take a cut of sales of third-party software applications as well.

The hardware profits are likely here to stay. Apple has been hugely successful in driving down costs and keeping margins up. For the most part, Apple doesn’t really lower prices. Its top of the line laptop has been in the $2,000-$2,500 range for years. Those $500 pieces of crap at Wal-Mart? Those are last year’s computers being sold as new. Apple doesn’t do that, so they keep their margins fat and juicy.

The same thing happened with the iPod. When it debuted in October 2001, the iPod was $399. For years the top of the line iPod remained around that price. Only more recently, with the advent of cheap flash drives — Apple spent $1.2 billion to snatch a huge percentage of the worldwide supply of it — has it been able to drive down the average cost of iPods. As a result, Apple has sold millions upon millions of the music players, taking a huge market share and laughing all the way to the bank.

That’s where Time missed the story. What’s really innovative about the iPhone? Well, the multitouch screen, perhaps. But other than that, its commodity parts expertly engineered together. If Apple sells 50 million iPhones in 2009, those phones will generate more than $30 billion in gross profit over the next two years. And when I say gross profit, I mean really gross.

Many observers scoffed when Steve Jobs called Apple a “tripod” company — Mac, iPod, and iPhone. At first, the iPhone looked like the weakest leg. Not for much longer.

And the Googlephone? Forget it. It’s just a bunch of developer tools right now, and Google’s happy to give them away. Apple, meanwhile, has been luring developers by playing hard to get — first saying it wouldn’t open the iPhone, and then coquettishly changing its mind. That’s the kind of skirt-waving that drives programmers crazy — not Google’s drop-your-dress open-standards move.

Fifty million units in 2009 doesn’t seem like such a huge mountain to climb when you consider that Apple will have completed its international rollout by then — and launched revisions and new models of the iPhone. With fat profit margins thanks to massive economies of scale, cell-phone company kickbacks revenue-sharing and continued growth in the Mac and iPod legs, Apple’s iPhone is more than just an invention. It has all the makings of a killer business. As for Google — weren’t they going to make a phone once?

You’ll learn many things from the New York Times profile of Andy Rubin, the Google employee in charge of its secretive wireless project. That he has a retinal scanner on his front door, for example. Or that he almost struck a deal with telecom pioneer Craig McCaw before Google bought his latest startup, Android. What you won’t learn? That Rubin actually has a Googlephone coming to the market. That, of course, is because there is no Googlephone

Sad, really. Even gadget-obsessed blogs like Gizmodo has made its peace with the idea that Google’s project has gone from full-on hardware to a mere operating system. And I bet Times tech scribe John Markoff gets that Rubin’s ambitions have been scaled back. But if he sent his editors a memo, they appear to have ignored it, working Googlephone mentions into the headline, text of the article, and sidebar. They apparently haven’t actually read the article. Here’s a key paragraph:

“Instead of making money on software, you have someone who is saying they’re trying to make their money on services,” said Michael Kleeman, a technology strategist at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology at the University of California at San Diego. “The interesting question is whether the carriers will authorize the Google handsets on their networks.”

Markoff’s article, of course, doesn’t actually answer that question. So is there a Googlephone? According to this story, despite the promises of its headline: No.

(Photo by John Wilson/The New York Times)

“I am embarrassed by [the price] … There’s the homeless and charity and there are lots of things you could do with that money that would improve the world, right? So you know, ‘How selfish is this guy?’ … is the criticism. So the answer is pretty selfish, but I am not going to put a number on it.” — Tom Perkins, to CBS’s 60 Minutes, on the price tag for his ubermegasuperyacht Maltese Falcon. We bet he’ll feel better after he goes for a quick sail — and would be happy to take it off his hands if he’s still feeling guilty.

Source:Valleywag

Ready for a Googlephone? Wait until Monday. A source in the wireless industry tells me that Google is already quietly briefing reporters, under embargo, on its mobile plans — and that an announcement could come as soon as next week. The first partner? T-Mobile. It makes perfect sense. In 2005, Google bought Android, a startup founded by Andy Rubin. Before Android, Rubin ran Danger Research, the designer of T-Mobile’s Sidekick. But if you’re all hopped up for a Google-designed piece of hardware, you’ll be disappointed by the announcement, whenever it comes.

As we’ve said, there is no Googlephone. Instead of a phone as slick and streamlined as Google’s search interface, instead we may see customized mobile versions of Google services like Gmail and YouTube — but those already exist. And instead of a free mobile operating system, you’ll more likely see something like Google’s OpenSocial initiative for social networks — a set of programming tools, in other words. (No comment forthcoming from Google and T-Mobile, naturally.)

Until third-party developers pick those tools up and start building applications, there won’t be anything for gadget geeks to play with. And like most mashups, Web widgets, and Facebook apps, what we’ll get at first will be rehashes of applications that already exist today. Google’s wireless announcements may set the stage for interesting mobile apps years down the road — but get ready for whatever they announce next week to be a nonevent.