The New Google Photos: Free at Last, and Very Smart

The new Google Photos runs on both Android phones and iPhones.

Last Thursday was liberation day for Google Photos, the search giant’s appealing service for storing pictures and videos in the cloud. It was uncoupled from Google’s widely ignored social network, Google+, where it had been effectively hidden. And it was upgraded with new features.

Not only that, but Google gave Photos users free, unlimited storage for pictures and videos at the highest resolutions used by average smartphone owners. And it issued nearly identical versions of the shiny new standalone app across Android devices and Apple’s iPhones and iPads. There’s also a browser version for the Mac and Windows PCs.

Once you’ve backed up your photo library to the service, all your photos and videos, including any new ones you take, are synced among all of these devices.

I’ve been testing this new Google Photos for about a week, and despite a few drawbacks, I like it a lot. I consider it the best photo backup-and-sync cloud service I’ve tested — better than the leading competitors from Apple, Amazon, Dropbox and Microsoft.Google Photos was always good, but now it’s entirely outside of a social network. Lots of folks choose to share photos on social networks, but few want to share every single one publicly, or even among all their friends and followers. Now you don’t need a Google+ account to use Google Photos, and your pictures and videos remain private unless and until you choose to share them, Google says.And when you do want to share them, you can totally ignore Google+ and easily and quickly post them to Facebook, Twitter and other networks, on both Android and iOS. You can email a link to a photo to someone, which works whether or not he or she has the Google Photos app.

People, Places and Things

The coolest aspect of the new Google Photos is that once you click the search button — before you even type anything — the app presents you with groups of pictures organized by three categories: People, Places and Things.

Quin Paek for Re/codeThe new Things feature in Google+, on an iPad

In the People section, Google collects all the photos containing faces it thinks are the same, without any work by you. It doesn’t identify these people, but just collects them for you for quick access. I found its guesses remarkably accurate. It even picked out a tiny image of my wife in the background of a group shot.

In the Places section, Google relies on geo-tagging where available. For older photos taken with cameras that lacked location tracking, it relies on known landmarks. For instance, it correctly identified a photo of the Eiffel Tower at night that I took with a cheap camera in 2002.

But the Things section, while less accurate, is more impressive. Here, the app uses cloud computing power to aggregate shots of, say, flowers or cars or the sky or tall buildings or food or concerts, graduations, birthdays — and yes, cats. And there are many more categories, including screenshots, posters and castles.

I was impressed by most of Google’s choices in the Things section. For instance, a category called Boats correctly included everything from fishing boats off Cape Cod to gondolas in Venice.

But there were some errors. For example, under Screenshots, Google Photos included an original, professionally-taken photo of me interviewing the company’s own top executive, Sundar Pichai — and it wasn’t a screenshot. And under the category Sky it included a graphic for an event by archrival Apple, which wouldn’t qualify as a Sky scene except on a planet where the sky was greenish and the sun was in the shape of the Apple logo.

You can remove such classification errors manually.

Quin Paek for Re/codeThe People feature in the new Google Photos app

My only real complaint with the People, Places and Things feature is that it’s not easy to find. You can only see it when you click the search button.

Photo Effects

As before, Google Photos automatically creates collages, animations, photo groups, panoramas and “stories” from photos it detects as being from the same place and time. You can choose whether to keep these in your library. As in the past, I generally found these pleasing and accurate. For instance, for my library, it created a Story — a sort of digital photo book — for a recent trip I took to China and Hong Kong, complete with maps showing my route.

The new version includes an “Assistant” panel that shows how your backup is going and presents these auto-created collections so you can choose whether you want to keep them.

You can also now manually create collages, animations, stories and more. And there are lightweight editing tools, including filters.

Search

Not surprisingly, search is a central feature in Google Photos, easily accessible from a blue button at the lower right of the screen. When I typed in “Massachusetts,” Google Photos instantly brought up loads of photos of subjects, ranging from my baby granddaughter (who lives there) to Revolutionary War sites I’d visited there to games I had attended at glorious Fenway Park in Boston.

Navigation

When you want to select multiple pictures — say, for sharing or creating an album — you don’t have to tap on them one by one. You can just select the first one and then slide your finger to add others to the selection.

Quin Paek for Re/codeGoogle Photos runs on Android and Apple mobile devices and PCs.

Also, you can pinch and zoom to switch the view of your photo library from years to months to days.

Downsides

The new Google Photos does have a few flaws. The initial upload can be very slow, even on a fast Internet connection. For instance, it took nearly a week to upload my 36,000-image library from my iPhone. In my case, Google said the glacial speed may have been because the app had to fetch each original from Apple’s iCloud Photo Library, to which I had previously backed up all my pictures. Backing up my Android Nexus 5, which had fewer photos, (most of which were already in Google Photos), was much faster.

Also, the free-storage option only applies to pictures of 16 megapixels or less, and videos of 1080p or less. Larger items get compressed. These sizes are more than enough for most people, but photographers and hobbyists who want to store and sync larger, uncompressed items get just 15 gigabytes free, and that is shared with other Google services, like Gmail. For more storage, they have to pay from $2 to $200 a month for 100GB up to 20 terabytes of storage.

More details on storage, and all other aspects of the new app, can be found in Google’s help site for the new Photos app.

(Note: Your photos from the old Google+ version of the app automatically reside in the new Google Photos, with a few exceptions.)

Finally, while Google promises privacy and the app has no ads, using it requires you to trust a company whose business model is tracking your actions and selling ads.

Bottom Line

The new Google Photos brings the company’s expertise in artificial intelligence, data mining and machine learning to bear on the task of storing, organizing and finding your photos. And that, combined with its cross-platform approach, makes it the best of breed.

Clarification: In some cases, Google will compress photos of under 16 megapixels in resolution backed up under its free, unlimited storage plan. However, a company official says, this happens “if and only if we can do so without affecting the image quality.” In my tests, I noticed no diminution of quality in my photos.

Google Says 21 Percent of Tech Hires in 2014 Were Women

Google said 21 percent of tech hires last year were women, boosting the overall number of women in technical roles by 1 percent, as part of efforts to increase diversity.

The company recently began disclosing the makeup of its workforce after admitting that it was “wrong, and that it’s time to be candid about the issues.”

The technology industry has long been plagued not just by allegations of a gender gap but also by a broad lack of inclusiveness that affects minorities too.

Google said Monday that the increase in Black and Hispanic employees outpaced the company’s overall hiring growth, but made up for only 2 percent and 3 percent of total workforce, respectively.

“Though we still have a long way to go, we’re seeing some early progress,” the company said in a Google Plus post.

As of Dec. 31, Google had 53,600 full-time employees.

After Nine Years of Secret Development, Hound Voice Search App Has a Dazzling Demo

More than nine years of top-secret work have gone into creating this product demo. And it’s one of the better ones I’ve seen.

“Show me hotels in Seattle for Friday, staying one night,” SoundHound CEO Keyvan Mohajer orders the Hound app on his Android phone. I was leaving for Seattle the day after our meeting, so Mohajer is using my trip as an impromptu scenario to show me how his voice search is smarter than Siri and Google Now. In a few seconds, 10 results appear on a map.

“Show only the ones costing less than $300,” Mohajer refines, explaining that the slight delay of three to four seconds — not much, considering it’s travel search — is because this feature is powered by a relationship with Expedia.

SoundHound CEO Keyvan Mohajer

Then he starts listing more parameters, without slowing down: “Show only the ones that have three or four or five stars that are pet friendly, that have a gym and a pool, within 4.5 miles of the Space Needle.” The app gets that right away, and refines the results.

Then Mohajer ups the stakes by changing the original parameters. “What if I check in on Thursday, and stay for two nights?” Without the usual annoyance of a back button resetting the page, we see results for the same complicated search on different dates. Siri and Google Now definitely don’t do this (I tried; they both gave me unsorted lists of hotels in Seattle).

Mohajer explains the difference is that his technology is “speech to meaning” instead of “speech to text.” By combining speech recognition and natural language understanding into one engine — that was the big nine-year effort — Hound can be faster than the voice search competition and understand more compound queries.

And this is not just a hotel search app — it’s an app where you can press a button and ask just about anything: Weather, stocks, time zones, even a complex mortgage calculation or currency conversion.

To get the Hound app to market, Mohajer did not follow the typical entrepreneurial path. Startups, especially mobile app startups, don’t enjoy nine years of R&D before launch.

You may have heard of SoundHound before — it makes the music recognition app of the same name, which is much like Shazam except that it recognizes songs even when you’re humming them. It’s a neat magic trick. It’s been installed more than 260 million times.

Mohajer founded SoundHound in September 2005 with the goal of creating a way for humans to talk to computers, and computers to talk back. He raised some money from WaldenVC, TransLink Capital and Global Catalyst Partners. But the big ideas were a long way off from coming to reality. So while the main technology was fermenting, SoundHound set up an interim business — the music recognition app — which supports the company’s operations through ads and fees from music stores when people buy songs after searching for them.

The new Hound app won’t be broadly available yet — it’s being released invite-only on Android. (iOS is in the works.) It’s a steep uphill battle given that both Google and Apple have their own voice search offerings built into their operating systems.

That’s not the only challenge: Will Hound actually work as well as it demos? Even if people download the Hound app and remember to open it, will they expand their imaginations to ask questions outside of the Tarzan-style keyword searches we’ve all become familiar with? Will they take the time to learn about Hound’s 50 different specialized domains (Siri has something like 20)? That’s a tough job for a startup best known for its humming magic tricks.

Mohajer admits those challenges are real — but he reminds me how good the demo is. And he says the consumer app isn’t SoundHound’s only bet. “Our vision is: Everything could be Houndified.” That is, the Hound technology will be available to developers as a tool called Houndify, with a “non-prohibitive” price that includes a free tier. So maybe even if I don’t use Hound itself, the next time I use somebody else’s hotel search, it will work like Mohajer’s demo.

Amazon’s TV Box Gets Some More Serious Video Games

The Fire TV, Amazon’s 2014 answer to set-top boxes like Roku and Apple TV, was supposed to have its own gaming identity, with both original titles made by Amazon Game Studios and a focus on “mid-market” games.

In practice, though, the 700-plus game titles currently available on Fire TV have trended toward the casual and overlapped heavily with Amazon’s existing Android Appstore — meaning they didn’t wring much extra value out of the TV box’s $40 controller. A new app called Playcast thinks it can inject some more diversity into the system.

Playcast, an Israeli company now owned by game rental company GameFly, is launching a cloud-based game-streaming service in the U.S. today, and it’ll start exclusively on Fire TV. Rather than paying a flat rate as one might for Netflix (even though Playcast is billing itself as a “Netflix for games”), the service will instead offer bundles of games for varying monthly subscription prices.

Several of those games — including Batman: Arkham Asylum, Fear 3 and Grid 2 — do not yet have mobile versions, meaning the Fire TV may be a cheaper way to get them for gamers who don’t own a console or gaming PC.

Terms of GameFly’s acquisition of Playcast were not disclosed. Competitors in the game-streaming space include Nvidia, which offers a service called Grid, and Sony, which streams its older titles to the PlayStation 4 via a service called PlayStation Now; in April, Sony acquired the patents of an erstwhile competitor, OnLive.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo: We Need to Show Wall Street We Can Deliver (Video)

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo is a man of his word — at least that’s what he’s trying to prove to Wall Street.

Costolo, who spoke onstage Thursday at Re/code’s annual Code Conference in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., said his mission for Twitter hasn’t changed despite a poor earnings report last month and a slumping stock price. The company is still trying to build its audience by showing tweets to people outside of Twitter, on TV or other platforms like Flipboard.

People are on board with this plan, Costolo said, and it’s time to prove that that plan can deliver actual growth and, more importantly, revenue.

“People believe the strategy,” he said. “They buy it. But we have to show that, ‘It’s great you reached a billion people on and off your site — help me understand how you’re going to monetize that. Show me how you’re going to monetize that.’ Those are things we know and we need to show them how we do it.”

Costolo and Twitter have spent the past year dealing with growth issues, and there was speculation that Twitter had entertained potential buyers ahead of a less-then-stellar earnings report in April. Costolo said flat out that he’s not shopping his company around.

“We have every intention of being an independent [public] company,” he added. “Those things you read about in the press are simply rumors, not facts.”

Costolo was joined onstage by Periscope CEO Kayvon Beykpour, who runs the livestreaming startup that Twitter just bought in January.

Periscope found itself at the center of a new, intriguing debate earlier this month regardinglivestreaming and the potential issues it poses to U.S. copyright laws.

The technology is still fairly new — new enough that broadcasters and sports leagues are still trying to determine how to handle scenarios like the one that took place earlier this month when Periscope users broadcasted the pay-per-view boxing match between Floyd Mayweather and Manny Pacquiao.

In that instance, Twitter pulled down dozens of streams that were broadcasting the fight illegally, but the incident shed light on just how difficult it will be for the company to monitor thousands of live video feeds at one time. Beykpour said there’s no simple way to solve the issue, and existing tools, like YouTube’s Content ID, that automatically identify copyrighted materials don’t work so well with live content.

“There’s a lot of innovation to be had,” he said. “It needs to be different than the tools that exist. [YouTube’s] Content ID works in a world where prerecorded content was the thing, and I think in a world where you have [live broadcast] the tool needs to be different.”

Periscope is still growing, Beykpour added, noting that he doesn’t believe the service is just a flash in the pan. People are watching the equivalent of 10 years’ worth of video every day.

Is Fitbit Working on New Audio Products? Jawbone Filing Claims It Is.

A lawsuit filed earlier today by Jawbone against rival wearable-maker Fitbit alleges that Fitbit is looking to make audio products that would compete with Jawbone’s.

On Page 18 of the complaint, which was filed in California State Court, Jawbone suggests that Fitbit poached a particular employee, Patrick Narron, because of his specific expertise in audio design and engineering.

“To date, Fitbit has never offered to consumers any product that contains a speaker or other component designed for independent audio playback,” the document reads. “Although the development of audio products now appears to be a strategic initiative for Fitbit, the company lacked the expertise and competency to success in that competitive market. … Fitbit sought to … acquire that expertise overnight by luring Mr. Narron to join the company (with a wealth of Jawbone’s confidential information about audio products in tote).” (Emphasis added.)

On the following page the complaint says:

“As an expert in audio signal chain, Mr. Narron was leading Jawbone’s design of its new headset, which is a product category for which Fitbit did not, and does not, have a competing offering. … Put simply, Mr. Narron was an ideal target for Fitbit, which wanted to develop a line of audio products using the proprietary expertise of its chief competitor.”

And later on:

“Mr. Narron has disclosed, used and continues to use these trade secrets in the performance of his job at Fitbit, and threatens to continue to use some or all of these trade secrets in the future, for example, by utilizing Jawbone’s manufacturing processes or audio signal chain designs in developing audio products for Fitbit as it scrambles to figure out a strategic path forward,” Jawbone’s complaint says.

So. Is Fitbit working on new audio products?

A representative for Jawbone, as well as Jawbone’s legal team, would not comment or offer further details on these particular claims in the suit. And Fitbit has not yet responded to requests for comment about its supposed plans.

But if Fitbit is working on audio products, it would mean a new product category for the San Francisco company, which recently announced plans for an IPO.

“Audio products” could also mean a variety of things, ranging from entirely new form factors to functions within existing products.

Let’s take a look at some totally theoretical possibilities:

Bluetooth speakers: This one would come as a bit of a surprise, since Fitbit for the past eight years has only sold activity-tracking products (unlike Jawbone, which launched in 2002 as a company that made noise-canceling audio technology). A Bluetooth speaker doesn’t exactly fit within Fitbit’s current mission as a health-and-wellness company. On the other hand, margins can be pretty high on items like Bluetooth speakers. As NPD Group analyst Ben Arnold once said when I asked why there were so darn many Bluetooth speakers on the market, “If you have the right mix of brand [and] good-enough audio engineering, there is a lot of opportunity.”

Activity-tracking headphones: This type of device would be more in line with Fitbit’s current product lineup — say, if Fitbit ported some of its activity-tracking and heart-rate monitoring sensors into a pair of fitness headphones. On the flip side, since Fitbit’s other wearables are supposed to track your steps and workouts 24/7 anyway, Fitbit could potentially be working on non-activity-tracking headphones (or headsets) that simply act as a companion product to other Fitbits. And, as with a Bluetooth speaker, if they’re priced on the high end, there’s the potential for fat profit margins.

Audio alerts within activity-trackers: A decidedly less exciting possibility, but worth noting regardless, is that Fitbit might simply be looking to hire a person or people with audio expertise because the company is looking to create or improve audio alerts for existing products — in this case, wearables.

What You Missed at Code Conference Day Two: Ellen Pao, BuzzFeed and More

Today at the Code Conference we’ll be hearing from Xiaomi’s Hugo Barra, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo and others. But before all that gets going, here’s a roundup of what happened yesterday:

• Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers’ Mary Meeker delivered her twentieth Internet Report, detailing important trends and statistics in the tech industry. The big takeaway: Facebook and Twitter growth is slowing down, but the on-demand economy is (predictably) heating up.
• Les Moonves, the head honcho at CBS, said he’s not worried about competition from Netflix, Viacom and CBS aren’t merging anytime soon and CBS will probably be a part of Apple’s upcoming TV service.
• BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti wants to take the company public one day, and Peretti and Editor in Chief Ben Smith said we should expect to see BuzzFeed on TV one day as well.
• Jeff Williams, the Apple exec who led the company’s Apple Watch drive, confirmed that the product’s developer kit is coming very soon and acknowledged rumors about the company’s ongoing automotive efforts. Williams also called the car “the ultimate mobile device” and, in classic Apple fashion, simply said “a lot” of Apple Watches have been sold.
• Talking about Reddit and her gender discrimination suit, Ellen Pao explained that she’s not nearly as complicated as most people think. She talked about inadvertentlybecoming an icon for women in tech, and what’s going on with harassment and censorship on Reddit.
• General Motors CEO Mary Barra revealed that Apple CarPlay and Android Auto are coming to Chevy cars, and (eventually) robot cars will be here too.
• Airbnb’s Brian Chesky is just fine with being more toned down than entrepreneurs like Travis Kalanick, thank you very much; his company is approaching one million guests per night.
• Omid Kordestani, chief business officer at Google, confirmed that a “buy button” is imminent, and the company’s not stopping its “moonshot” projects anytime soon.
• Oculus boss Brendan Iribe said the total price for Oculus Rift will be around $1,500. He’ll talk more about controllers for the product at E3, and he wants to make it kid-friendly as well.
• Brian Cornell, the relatively new CEO of Target, is warm to the idea of a partnership with Uber and he wants to accept chip-and-PIN credit cards before he integrates Apple Pay at Target locations.
• Using GoPro’s new 3-D recording software, you too can know what it’s like to be interviewed in the red chair by Kara Swisher. The company’s CEO, Nick Woodman, talked more about GoPro’s media business and why it’s getting into virtual reality and drones.
• Pinterest chief Ben Silbermann said he’s totally committed to gender diversity within Pinterest, and Sprint CEO Marcelo Claure promised that Sprint will become the No. 1 wireless company (but that the company’s unlimited plans aren’t going to be around forever).