Google I/O

The soundsmiths at Georgia Tech's Center for Music Technology this week revealed Shimi, a 1-foot-tall musical robot that aims to serve as a musical assistant.

Created by center director Gil Weinberg, Shimi's dual-speaker visage bobs its "head" and taps its hand/foot to the beat of a song while a range of features become available after docking an Android smartphone. Weinberg co-developed Shimi in collaboration with the Media Innovation Lab at IDC Herzliya, led by professor Guy Hoffmann.

For example, the pint-size Shimi utilizes facial recognition through the front-facing camera of an Android phone to position its speakers toward the listener for optimal sound. A summary of the device from Georgia Tech mentions a unique song selection method: "If the user taps or claps a beat, Shimi analyzes it, scans the phone's musical library and immediately plays the song that best matches the suggestion."… Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Google will be kicking off its annual developers conference here on Wednesday, and the company is expected to have lots of juicy news.

The Google I/O conference offers third-party developers a chance to mix-and-mingle with Google engineers. In the past, the company has used the event to highlight and announce new products and initiatives. And this year's event will likely offer the same.

The company will host two keynote sessions on Wednesday and Thursday morning, where company … Read more

Google will soon launch a tablet made by and co-branded with Asus, an executive for Asus said today.

"It's targeting Amazon," the unidentified exec told Reuters about the device. "The Kindle is based on Google's platform but with its own service, so Google has to launch its own service, too."

Google is expected to unveil its own 7-inch tablet at the company's I/O conference, which starts today and runs until Friday. But the Asus executive's statement is the first that seemingly confirms an upcoming launch of the new product.… Read more

SAN FRANCISCO -- Some people go to Hawaii or the Caribbean for a destination wedding. But Jon Weissenburger and his bride Nina decided that Google I/O here in San Francisco was much more romantic.

The couple tied the knot at the San Francisco courthouse Tuesday morning, and then swung by the Moscone Center in the afternoon so that Jon could register and pick up his badge for the three day event that gets underway Wednesday.

When I saw them standing in line at the convention center, I assumed they were some wacky, Android-obsessed couple. After all, there have been … Read more

Google is hoping to give its foundering Google TV effort a jump start from shock jock Howard Stern.

Satellite radio provider Sirius XM told Reuters that it will make all of its programming available on Google TV through a new app that will allow listeners to pause live programs and play back up to five hours of content. Sirius XM is expected to announce the deal tomorrow at Google's I/O developers conference in San Francisco. (Update, June 27 at 7:25 a.m. PT: It's official: SiriusXM says it's coming soon to Google TV.)

The app, … Read more

Google will launch a $199 tablet this week at its developers conference co-branded with Asus, Bloomberg is reporting.

This follows a series of reports that have been trickling out for months about a 7-inch Nexus tablet being developed with Asus. The tablet is slated to debut at the Google I/O conference that starts Wednesday.

The one feature garnering the most attention is price. At $199, the Google tablet is $200 less than Apple's $399 iPad 2.

Previous reports have claimed the Nexus device will sport the Android 4.1 "Jelly Bean" operating system, a quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 … Read more

Squashing any lingering doubts about the arrival of the next version of Android, Google has put up a Jelly Bean sculpture on its campus.

The sculpture appears next to others in a collection of alphabetically ordered sweets after which new versions of Google's mobile operating system is named: Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, and Ice Cream Sandwich.

The Google Developers Google+ page showed off the new sculpture today, the day before the company's Google I/O conference begins in San Francisco. The show is geared for Android and Web developers and others who tap into Google's … Read more

For months now we've been hearing about a possible Google-designed Nexus Android tablet, which could be unveiled as soon as tomorrow at the Google I/O keynote. There's been leaked images, specs and word that ASUS will be manufacturing the 7-inch tablet running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.

We could soon finally learn how much of what we've heard is true, and here's my wish list of what I'd like to see in a Nexus tablet (Note: Although I'd love to see it happen so that Palm users may be avenged, I've stricken my desire to see a Nexus tablet running WebOS, because the idea is of course totally ridiculous -- but man, would that be hilarious.):… Read more

Break off a piece of that BlackBerry and friend some strangers on Facebook:

BlackBerry maker Research In Motion has long been struggling to turn the company around. With thousands of layoffs ongoing, it could be time for the company to try something drastic. One report says RIM is considering spliting itself into two companies by diving the messaging network from the hardware side, and possibly selling the hardware division. RIM didn't comment on specifics of this report by The Sunday Times. But RIM did say it is examining a wide-range of strategies. Perhaps new BlackBerry 10 devices can shake … Read more