Facebook: Better for the Planet than Google

Facebook revealed its 2011 carbon footprint on Wednesday that is, the amount of planet-warming carbon dioxide its offices and data centers’ energy usage is responsible for.

The figure was good enough to earn the social network kudos from Greenpeace and allowed it to look down its nose at less environmentally-friendly tech rivals, such as Google.

Facebook’s total energy usage last year measured 532 million Kilowatt hours; minus the 36% of its energy the company gets from renewable and nuclear sources, that led to 285,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions.

Compare that with the most recent annual total for Google: 1.5 million tons of CO2 in 2010. The relative difference in size between the companies doesn’t account for that; Facebook has designed its own servers to be as energy efficient as possible.

Does that mean hanging out with friends on the social network is a greener activity than searching? Facebook would certainly like you to think so. In a blog post announcing its carbon footprint report Wednesday, the company broke out the annual carbon dioxide emissions per monthly active user: 269 grams.

“To put this into context,” says the report, “one person’s Facebook use for all of 2011 had roughly the same carbon footprint as one medium latte. Or three large bananas. Or a couple of glasses of wine.”269 grams doesn’t sound like a big deal, until you consider that Facebook has 955 million active users. That’s a whole lot of lattes.

Still, environmental leaders were pleased. “Today’s detailed disclosure and announcement of a clean energy target shows that the company means business and wants the world to follow its progress,” said Greenpeace International Senior IT Analyst Gary Cook in a statement.

Not that there isn’t a lot of work to do, as Facebook admits in its report. The company would like to get up to 25% renewable energy in the short term, but admits that its carbon emissions are likely to “get worse before they get better” since the company is growing so fast.

Google Hangout Goes Pro With NFL’s Fantasy Football League

Trash talking during fantasy football drafts just got a bit more real.

Google+ announced on Wednesday that it is teaming up with the NFL to bring its Hangout video chats to the league’s fantasy football platform. This means you can see the look on your friends’ faces as you draft each player and watch them gloat during big plays throughout the season.

“If your buddy nabs Adrian Peterson in the first round of your Fantasy Football draft, it’s going to be an emotional moment,” Steve Grove, head of community partnerships for Google+. “Since the NFL is already a social game and it allows fans to connect in real-time through Fantasy leagues, it’s a natural partnership for us.”

For any fantasy league set up through NFL.com/fantasy page, a Google+ Hangout button integrated on the team page will launch the group into video chat mode. It can be used not only during drafts, but when trading players or watching the game. Since the standard fantasy league has about a dozen players, Google is upping the number of Hangout participants from 10 to 12 on NFL.com/fantasy.

SEE ALSO: Google Cracks Down on Deceptive Android Apps

This is the first time the company has integrated Hangouts directly onto a partner’s website.
“There are moments in sports that are highly emotional that you call your friend to connect around the latest play or touchdown,” Grove said. “Hangouts make it that much more direct with several people at once, regardless of where they are in the country.”

He also noted that Hangouts could be coming to other fantasy leagues in the future too.

“It’s promising that it could move to other leagues in the future too, but it’s not just optimized for sports,” Grove said. “Publishers in general can set up Hangouts around an article that is gaining traction or a wedding site can host a Hangout to give advice on planning the day. We’re seeing a lot of innovation right now with the technology and sports is just one way to pursue your interests in a whole new way.”

Google Cracks Down on Deceptive Android Apps

Google sent out an email to its developer community with news that Google Play is undergoing policy changes to crack down on shady behavior in the Android market.

Google has updated developer program policy page to make the platform more secure and easier to navigate for users. The search giant also outlined the types of apps not allowed on the platform. For example, apps that disclose personal information such as credit-card and social-security numbers without authorization are not allowed.

Google is also restricting developers from using names or icons similar to existing apps, ostensibly to cut down on piracy.

“Don’t pretend to be someone else, and don’t represent that your app is authorized by or produced by another company or organization if that is not the case,” Google said on its policy page. “Products or the ads they contain also must not mimic functionality or warnings from the operating system or other applications.”

 SEE ALSO: Outlook.com Gets 1 Million Users in First 6 Hours

To ward off spam, the policy also said developers shouldn’t post repetitive content, and product descriptions should not be misleading or loaded with keywords to boost its relevancy in the store’s search results. Google noted that sending SMS, email or other messages on behalf of the user without their approval is forbidden.

“We are constantly striving to make Google Play a great community for developers and consumers,” Google said in the email. “This requires us to update our policies when we launch new features, like subscription billing, and also when we see unhealthy behavior, like deceptive app names and spammy notifications.”

Violations to any of these rules could get developers and apps kicked out of Google Play for good.

Google Delays Nexus Q Launch

Google announced on Tuesday that it is holding shipments of its Nexus Q “cloud-connect jukebox” gadget while the company “works on making it even better.” To make up for the delay, the company is sending the current model to customers who pre-ordered the device for free.

The search engine giant reportedly sent out an email informing customers who pre-ordered the device that the Nexus Q will be delayed as it undergoes improvements. Google said the news comes on the heels of consumer feedback.

“When we announced Nexus Q at Google I/O, we gave away devices to attendees for an early preview. The industrial design and hardware were met with great enthusiasm,” Google said in an email. “We also heard initial feedback from users that they want Nexus Q to do even more than it does today. In response, we have decided to postpone the consumer launch of Nexus Q while we work on making it even better.”

As a thank you to those that pre-ordered the device, Google will be waiving its $299 cost.

Google unveiled its first social streaming media player made for Google Play during its annual developer conference in San Francisco. The device streams music and entertainment from the cloud to your home and can be controlled via multiple devices. The device, which weighs in at about two pounds, was scheduled to ship in mid-July.

Google Acquires Social Media Management Platform Wildfire

Google has acquired social media management platform Wildfire Interactive for an undisclosed amount, the tech giant announced Tuesday.

Wildfire, which launched four years ago by Victoria Ransom and Alain Chuard (pictured) was funded in part by Facebook, counts Amazon, Verizon Wireless, Virgin, Gilt Groupe and Spotify among its clients. It helps them manage their content, ads, promotions and more across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google+ and Pinterest.

Wildfire is the latest in a string of acquisitions of B2B social media firms. In May, Oracle paid $300 million for Vitrue, a cloud-based firm that handles social media communications for McDonald’s, American Express and Gillette, among others. Oracle followed that acquisition by snapping up social media monitoring firm

Collective Intellect in early June. That same month, Salesforce.com paid $745 million for Buddy Media, and Syncapse bought a smaller social media firm, Clickable. It was long rumored that Facebook was interested in buying Wildfire.

The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but AllThingsD‘s Peter Kafka‘s sources tell him its around $250 million a third of the price Salesforce paid for Buddy Media, which Google was reportedly once interested in purchasing.

In a blog post, Google’s Jason Miller said that Wildfire would be integrated into its suite of website and ad management tools, including Google Analytics, Admeld and DoubleClick. It’s Google’s way of ensuring that advertisers continue to come to Google to purchase and manage their display advertising campaigns, whether they’re looking to do it on Google or on another social network.

Google Maps Adds Service Alerts for New York City Subways

Google announced on Tuesday it is rolling out planned service alerts for New York City’s subway system within Google Maps.

To make it easier for New Yorkers to commute and keep them posted on scheduled maintenance and delays, Google is adding information about service alerts that occur throughout the city’s 468 subway stations labeled on Google Maps.


“Since first making New York City public transit directions available in Google Maps, we’ve been working to deliver you with the most accurate and useful information about subway, bus, commuter rail, and ferry service across the greater metro area,” Csaba Garay, transit partner technology manager at Google Maps, said via its company blog. “Starting today, we’ll also be showing planned service alerts for the city’s subways, which serve more than 200 million people every year.”

Google said alerts will automatically be included in the step-by-step transit directions pointing users where to go.

“We’re regularly adding new cities and features globally and looking forward to continuing our efforts to make travel by public transportation a better experience in more than 400 regions around the world,” Garay added. “For everybody who lives in one of New York City’s five boroughs, commutes in and out every day or is visiting for business or vacation, we hope today’s update improves the ease and efficiency of your trips around the city.”

Goodbye, Gmail Video Chat. Hello Google+ Hangouts

If you enjoy video chatting over Gmail the way you’ve been doing it since 2008, better wave your last goodbyes to your buddy list.

Starting Monday, and continuing over the next few weeks, Google is going to be replacing Gmail video chat with Google+ Hangouts. “Unlike the old video chat, which was based on peer-to-peer technology, Hangouts utilize the power of Google’s network to deliver higher reliability and enhanced quality,” reads the explanatory blog post written by the Gmail team.

“You’ll be able to chat with all the same people you did before and, in fact, with Hangouts you’ll now be able to reach them not only when they are using Gmail, but also if they are on Google+ in the browser or on their Android or iOS devices.”

The search giant is eager to promote the use of its social network, and has in the past attempted to blur the lines between users of Gmail, Google Maps and other Google services. If you’re logged into any of them, the company says, you’re logged into Google+.

Nefarious network-boosting purposes aside, Google Hangouts is clearly a superior technology. In our experience, Gmail video chat had a tendency to stutter and occasionally quit a quality shared in the past with iChat video, but not with Apple’s Facetime, Skype or Google Hangouts.

Hangouts also scales a lot better, making it much easier to add new people to the meeting. Audio is spectacularly good at long range. It’s likely the best choice for a company looking for a free alternative to Cisco Telepresence, for example.

And then there’s the feature that the Gmail team hints at in its blog the ability to add moustaches, beards, halos and other personal decorations not to mention cat and dog masks which will appear to follow you throughout the chat.

Google Admits Failing to Delete Street View Data

Google has admitted it did not delete all of the data collected by Street View mapping cars in 2010 in several countries, despite assuring the public the information including passwords and emails would be cleared from its records.

The reason for this Google fail: human error, The Telegraph reports the search giant as saying.

“Google has recently confirmed that it still has in its possession a small portion of payload data collected by our Street View vehicles in the UK. Google apologizes for this error,” Google Global Privacy Counsel Pete Fleischer wrote to Steve Eckersley, head of enforcement at the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

In addition to the UK, data was also collected in Ireland, France, Belgium, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Austria and Australia.

Though Google says managers knew that junior engineer’s code allowed the data to be stored, the company maintains that it never used the information commercially.

“In recent months, Google has been reviewing its handling of Street View disks and undertaking a comprehensive manual review of our Street View disk inventory,” Fleischer added in his note to the ICO. “That review involves the physical inspection and re-scanning of thousands of disks. In conducting that review, we have determined that we continue to have payload data from the UK and other countries. We are in the process of notifying the relevant authorities in those countries.”

According to the ICO, the data was collected before May 2010 and was supposed to be deleted before December 2010. Google agreed with the ICO to delete the stored information in November 2010.

The ICO has demanded Google immediately supply its stored data before the office will decide how to procede with its course of action.

Amazon Beating Google as First Stop for Shoppers [STUDY]

Thirty percent of online buyers began researching their last online purchases at Amazon, more than double the number who began their research with Google, according to a Forrester Research survey released Thursday.

That’s almost a complete reversal from two years ago, when 24% of participants said they began researching their last online purchases at Google, versus 18% on Amazon.

The stat points to the growing threat Amazon represents to other retailers, who are already struggling against Amazon’s competitive pricing and popular price comparison app, which is designed to capture sales away from brick-and-mortar retailers right before checkout. As more shoppers turn to Amazon directly to shop, other online retailers may feel the need to establish a sales channel on the site, or risk losing out on exposure.

Amazon’s global net sales amounted to $48 billion last year. Its sales in U.S. have outpaced e-commerce growth as a whole, accounting for 19% of all online sales in the country last year, and up from 9% in 2001. Eighty-six percent of American who said they’ve bought something online said they have purchased something from Amazon at some point.

But Amazon’s biggest growth stories are taking place outside of the U.S. Nearly half of its revenue now comes from international sources. The company has established e-commerce websites and distribution centers in countries including China, France, Germany, Japan and the UK. It is looking to broaden its establishment in India, where it already has software development offices and a call center, and has rumored plans to establish a consumer-direct operation in Brazil as well. Amazon has 173 million active accounts around the world, the company disclosed on its first quarter earnings call.

And though the company is known as a vendor of media products think books, e-books, music and video other categories are witnessing strong growth, namely consumer electronics. As of 2010, revenue from non-media products makes up more than half of total revenue. Still, its path into all categories has not been completely smooth, Forrester points out, fashion being a prime example.

Amazon’s marketplace for third-party sellers is also thriving, accounting for nearly 40% of all products shipped. Revenues from the marketplace remain small at 9%, but profits are strong and growing.

And what’s driving this success? Forrester points to some “key strategic differentiators”: a “rentless obsession” with customer experience; a willingness to invest heavily in customer acquisition and retention through low prices and programs like Lending Library and Amazon Prime; its investment in technology, which is more than double the average retailer, as well as logistics; and a willingness to play “legal hardball,” going after Apple for fixing prices of e-books and fighting against states’ attempts to levy taxes against the retailer.

Going forward, expect to see Amazon establish fulfillment centers in major metropolitan areas to offer same and next-day shipping as it bends to support legislation to develop a national sales tax system. Amazon may also establish physical storefronts in those areas, enabling consumers to pick up orders and sample the retailer’s consumer electronics lineup. It will also continue to move into new verticals, pushing more aggressively into apparel, automotive and home improvement categories.

Google Fiber TV Coming Soon to a Living Room Near You

In addition to announcing details about its new high-speed Internet network Google Fiber which runs 100 times faster than today’s average broadband Google unveiled Thursday its new initiative for the home: Google Fiber TV.

The interactive service allows you to watch and record up to 500 hours of television and tape up to eight shows at once — across its new Google Fiber Internet network. Content is also searchable via its DVR and the system connects to services such as Netflix.

Although the concept isn’t new Verizon has had its Fios service since 2005 it’s new territory for Google. The news comes as the company brings its ultra-high speed network first to Kansas City, Kan. and Kansas City, Mo.

The search engine giant is making various packages available for the service. For $120 a month, users will get Fiber TV along with the Gigabit broadband service, a terabyte of Google Drive cloud storage and various TV channels, on-demand content and movie networks. It will also come with a free Google Nexus 7 tablet that will serve as a remote.

Meet Google Fiber, the New Lightning-Fast Internet Network

Google on Thursday detailed its high-speed Internet network called Google Fiber, which runs 100 times faster than today’s average broadband connection.

The search engine giant is bringing the ultra-high speeds first to Kansas City, Kan. and Kansas City, Mo. In addition to offering two paid packages, Google is also rolling out a virtually free service for at least the first seven years. (Note: You still have to pay a $300 installation fee).

“No more buffering. No more loading. No more waiting,” the company notes on its blog. “Imagine: instantaneous sharing; truly global education; medical appointments with 3D imaging; even new industries that we haven’t even dreamed of, powered by a gig.”

To get things started, the company divided Kansas City into small communities called “fiberhoods.” Each fiberhood needs a high majority of their residents to pre-register to get the service. Those communities with a high pre-registration percentage will be among the first to get Google Fiber. Households in those communities can register for the service throughout the next six weeks.

Households in fiberhoods that qualify will be able to select from various subscription packages. Internet will cost $70 a month, while Internet along with television will cost about $120. The free Internet service (with the $300 installation fee) is also available for $25 a month for 12 months.

According to the New York Times, a Nexus 7 tablet will come with the TV service package and serve as a remote.

“It’s easy to forget how revolutionary high-speed Internet access was in the 1990s,” the company said. “Not only did broadband kill the screeching sound of dial-up, it also spurred innovation, helping to create amazing new services as well as new job opportunities for many thousands of Americans. But today the Internet is not as fast as it should be.”

Google noted that the average Internet speed in the U.S. is only 5.8 megabits per second (Mbps), which is a slight uptick in speed first made available by residential broadband 16 years ago.

“Access speeds have simply not kept pace with the phenomenal increases in computing power and storage capacity that’s spurred innovation over the last decade, and that’s a challenge we’re excited to work on,” it said.

The news comes as the White House recently launched a public-private partnership called US Ignite to build ultra high-speed broadband networks in communities around the U.S.

Google Talk Is Down for Most Users

Had problems using Google Talk this morning? You’re not alone. Google’s instant messaging service has been down for two hours for most users.

The problem is affecting both Google Apps and Gmail users, though Google Apps customers appear to be suffering the most.

Google noted the first disruption of service at 6:40 a.m. on its App Status Dashboard. By 6:50 a.m., the disruption was changed to “service outage.”

At 8:50 a.m., the company added this note to its dashboard:

“Our team is continuing to investigate this issue. We will provide an update by 7/26/12 9:50 a.m. with more information about this problem. Thank you for your patience.”

In other words, don’t expect to get a lot of work done using GTalk for at least the next hour.
Twitter isn’t down, though, so users are discussing the GTalk outage on the service.

We’ll update this post with more information as it become available.

Camp Google+: Summer Program for Teens Kicks Off in Cyber Space

Most of our memories of summer camp involve bug bites, bunk beds and a lack of technology. This summer, camp is taking a new form, on Google+.

Makers Camp on Google+, launched by Make magazine, is a summer program for teens offering daily building projects to “make” just about anything. The 30-day program kicked off July 16 and runs weekdays through August 24.

“We’ve created the online summer camp experience that we wanted to do physically, but that wasn’t practical,” Dale Dougherty, founder and publisher of Make magazine, told to media. “We want to encourage teens to use the summer to make things, so we’re bringing in people who can demonstrate interesting projects.”

Each morning, teenage participants between 13 and 18 are taught by a guest instructor to create something individually such as animated GIFs or glow-in-the-dark candy. In the afternoon, campers share their creations in a Google+ Hangout led by a camp counselor.

“We’re trying to show that making is a form of participation,” Dougherty says. “It’s pretty compelling how tech allows us to do that.”

There’s a different theme daily such as “Weird Science Wednesday” and “Field Trip Friday.” Last week’s field trip, led by camp director Nick Raymond, brought the teens to Ford’s research center in Dearborn, Mich. The teens visited the R&D lab, the distracted driver trainer and the flight simulator.

Camp’s completely free and there’s no registration process required. To participate, teens just need to add Make to their Circles on Google+.

Google Search Gets a Cool, Useful Calculator

Before today, when you typed an equation into Google say, “15 x 7″ the answer (105, if you must know) would appear in bold above you actual search results. Now Google has gone one step further, giving you your answer on a virtual calculator.

The blue-hued calculator appears above your results, as before, and has 34 buttons, including standard trigonometric functions, exponents and buttons for the transcendental numbers, pi and e.

Bonus: It also works on mobile. In our quick test, it appeared in both Safari and Chrome on iOS and of course on Android as well. Although the scientific functions aren’t visible in portrait mode, they appear when you flip your phone to landscape a trick Google’s borrowing from the iOS-standard calculator.

Punching buttons is a little unwieldy in the desktop browser, but it’s natural as can be on a phone. Plus, on both versions, you can do calculations via voice search. The voice interface can even discern such phrasing as “cosine of 60 degrees.”

It’s not the first time Google has experimented with interactive calculators in its search tool. A Google Doodle late last year that celebrated the 60th anniversary of Stanislaw Lem’s first book featured a robot whose chest featured a calculator, although it was very limited and somewhat unreliable.

Nexus 7 Display Fails on Bright Imagery, Says Expert

If you want a tablet with the best display, that’s not the Google Nexus 7, a display expert claims. The 7-inch tablet which is garnering mainly positive reviews may have difficulty showing all the detail in bright imagery, according to the Raymond Soneira at DisplayMate.

Soneira, the same display specialist who challenged Apple’s initial claims of a “retina” display on the iPhone 4, is now taking aim at Google‘s prize tablet. In his test of the Nexus 7 display, he found its resolution, viewing angle, contrast ratio and color all to be top-notch. However, when it came to grayscale, it fell far short.

Soneira discovered the Nexus 7 reduces the intensity of bright image content by up to 25% meaning the brightest areas of an image are only about 75% as bright as they should be. That translates into some detail lost in the brightest areas of an image, and Soneira says the drop-off is “quite substantial.”

On the image (this shot of a Typhoon Guchol posted by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center), we could see that some of the detail in the whitest areas was only visible on the Samsung, although the Nexus 7′s higher-resolution display 1,280 x 800 to the Tab 2′s 1,024 x 600 made things sharper overall.

The issue became clearer viewing this grayscale pattern. Looking at the strip of white and light-gray squares on the right side of the screen, the Nexus 7 makes them all look whiter than on the Galaxy Tab 2, with the 1% box appearing identical to 0%. You can see the issue in the photo below (100% brightness, Nexus 7 on the right). The problem persists even when the brightness on both tablets is turned down to 50%.

How serious is this problem, though? We didn’t notice it at all when we reviewed the Nexus 7, and most reviews have been glowing about the tablet and its 7-inch IPS (in-plane switching) LCD screen.

Although Google is the brand on the Nexus 7, Asus makes the tablet. Soneira suspects Asus as responsible for the issue, as the manufacturer is responsible for the problematic grayscale. A software update may be able to correct the problem.

We contacted both Asus and Google about Soneira’s findings, but neither party has yet responded. We’ll update this story if they do.

Google Doodle Celebrates Amelia Earhart’s 115th Birthday

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the 115th birthday of aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart.
Earhart was the first woman to fly alone across the Atlantic ocean, one year after Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927.

She repeated that feat in 1932, and in 1935 became the first person to fly solo from Honolulu, Hawaii to Oakland, California.

Earhart disappeared during her round-the-world flight in 1937, never to be found. Though recent efforts tried to solve the mystery of Earhart’s disappearance, her fate still remains unknown.

Google Earth Adds Timelapse Videos of Earth Taken From Over 40 Years

Google announced on Monday it is celebrating the 40-year anniversary of NASA’s Landsat satellites that have been continuously circling the Earth and collecting data about its surface by making its images available on Google Earth.

Images of the Earth taken by Landsat satellites, which have been orbiting the globe every 16 days since July 1972, are now available in the form of timelapse videos. Google said it has been working with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and Carnegie Mellon University to bring the image collection online.

“With them you can travel through time, from 1999-2011, to see the transformation of our planet whether it’s deforestation in the Amazon, urban growth in Las Vegas or the difference in snow coverage between the seasons,” Google wrote in a post on its blog.

It is the longest-running record of the Earth’s landscape that has ever been recorded. The satellites go from pole to pole, capturing every inch of its surface and collecting data, before it repeats the same process. It allows scientists to monitor how the Earth changes over time and keep track of its health.

The company believes it may be the largest video frames ever created on the web: “If you could see the entire video at full resolution, a single frame would be 1.78 terapixels which is 18 football fields’ worth of computer screens laid side-by-side,” it added.

Although the USGS opened access to the Landsat archive for free in 2008, the Google Earth engine is now making it possible for the data to be easily accessed.

Google also launched a YouTube that details the Landsat program and how Google Earth was used to archive the photos. Check out the clip above.

Google Stops Taking Orders for 16GB Nexus 7

Demand for Google’s 7-inch Nexus 7 tablet seems to have well exceeded the tech giant’s expectations.

Last week, Google posted a message to its online store saying that shipments of the 16GB model were delayed one to two weeks. Now, the store has stopped taking orders altogether.

Those who want to purchase the $249 version of the tablet are told to sign up to be notified by e-mail when it is back in stock.

The 16GB version is also sold out at GameStop, Kmart, Sam’s Club, Office Depot, Staples, B&H, Best Buy in Canada and, according to The Guardian, Tesco in te UK. The only place to get the device online at this point may be eBay.

Google is still accepting orders for the 8GB version however, which costs $199.

The 7-inch, Asus-built tablet, which began shipping earlier this month, is the first to run the latest version of Android, codename Jelly Bean. It has a 1280×800 HD display (216 ppi) and a quad-core processor. It has received widely positive reviews from the press our own Peter Pachal called it “the Android media tablet the Kindle Fire was supposed to be.”

Apple Will Sell A Smaller iPad Or Be Disrupted From The Bottom Up By Google's Nexus 7

Apple watcher Ryan Jones, who blogs at IAmConcise, has an interesting graphical argument for a smaller, less expensive iPad. In his post today, The Reason for the iPad Mini, Jones refers to Tim Cook’s recent statement that Apple will “not leave a price umbrella for competitors” in the tablet space. A price umbrella is the cover that a market leader provides other companies by establishing a premium price for their products. Competitors can enter the market at lower price points and disrupt the leader’s dominance, in Jones words, “from the bottom up.”

Apple has effectively defended itself from bottom up competition twice before, Jones points out, with the iPod and iPhone. In the case of the iPod, it filled the bottom niche with the Nano and Shuffle. With the iPhone, Apple has been able to get the price down to $0 by continuing to sell the 3GS with its $400 price tag fully subsidized by the carriers.

So Jones has identified the three strategies that Apple has used to close the price umbrella in the past: 1) create a new product line 2) keep selling old hardware and 3) get someone else to subsidize the product. With the iPad, Apple has already played the old hardware card by selling the iPad 2 at $399. But the price umbrella is still open down to the $199 price of  the Google Nexus 7 and the Kindle Fire. It’s worth noting that Google makes exactly $0 on each Nexus 7 and Amazon loses money on each Fire.

The difference between the iPhone and the iPad, in terms of the third strategy, is that many iPads are sold WiFi only, without a data plan. In this way they more closely resemble the iPod Touch in terms of the price umbrella. So that really only leaves  Apple with the first strategy, creating a new product line.

Jones makes his point by charting every current model of iPhone, iPod, and iPad by price (see above). It’s a very compelling visualization because he lets the datamthe missing triangle in the iPad clustermmake his argument for him.

Beyond the questions of if and when is the question of what. In a post last week, I argued that the narrower 7″ form factor of the Nexus 7 and the Kindle Fire might be preferable in many use cases than the scaled down “iPad mini” that is being widely reported on. Apple wants to close the price umbrella while maintaining its dominant position. It may see the continuity with the larger iPad as important for brand identity and software compatibility.

But if the next iPhone is indeed an elongated version of the current 4S, then Apple could scale that form factor up like a super-sized iPod Touch and still maintain the connection to its existing product lines. If they go the way they are reported to be going and consumers turn out to want a $200 tablet they can grasp in one hand, Apple “iPad mini” may close the umbrella but get rained on by the more “handy” Android tablets.

Google Puts Social Twist on Ramadan Traditions

Google is making religion digital for the month of Ramadan with its launch of Islamic-geared YouTube channels and Google+ Hangouts.

For the duration of holy month when practicing Muslims fast from dawn to sunset  a YouTube channel will broadcast live daily prayers from Mecca.

Another YouTube channel will be dedicated to special religious programming about Islam as well as Arabic soap operas. Google’s official blog reports the channel will make more than 50 Ramadan shows available the same day they air on television.

Studies have shown that the rate of viewing Arabic soap operas has historically risen during Ramadan.

Google’s launch of the new channel may help capitalize its marketing with the large global audience during the month.

Additionally, Google+ will host a series of 30 Hangouts featuring celebrity chefs with their favorite Iftar (the sunset meal that breaks the fast) recipes, doctors with tips for eating healthy during Ramadan, poets discussing religious literature and even actors discussing their favorite religious shows.