Author: Serkadis

The unfolding horse meat outrage currently engulfing Europe has taken on a new, bizarre twist, according to investigators. Key figures involved in the unfolding scandal have been linked to a similar secretive network of companies that have ties to convicted Russian arms…

One of the few points of interest that emerged from a phablet-filled Mobile World Conference this year is the first round of phones powered by the new Firefox OS. Mozilla’s new HTML5-based mobile platform is open and available to vendors for free, and it could make a serious dent in emerging markets. But a stumbling block emerges as Samsung (005930), the world’s top cell phone maker by shipment volume, has reportedly stated that it has no interest in adopting the OS for its handsets, CNET reports. This makes sense since Samsung’s Android bet has already been hedged, but it could be a serious roadblock for Mozilla as Samsung continues to put its massive weight behind a push into emerging markets.

As we reported last month, smart grid network company Silver Spring Networks is still moving forward with its IPO, and on Tuesday set the terms for its IPO (hat tip Dana Hull). Silver Spring plans to sell 3.7 million shares at a price of between $16 and $18 per share, which at the midpoint would raise $63 million for the company.

That amount is less than half of what Silver Spring originally planned to raise at a maximum of $150 million. The company first filed to go public in the Summer of 2011. Longtime investor Foundation Capital also plans to purchase $12 million worth of stock at the IPO price, following the IPO, in a private placement.

We’ll see what price per share Silver Spring eventually lands on before it actually goes public, assuming it does make it out. If you only look at Silver Spring’s GAAP revenue and net income, the company doesn’t look all that amazing, which is what this analyst did. The company hasn’t ever had a positive net income, and it recorded revenue of $147 million for the nine months ended Sept 30, 2012, which was down from $176 million from the same period in 2011.

But if you look at the deals that Silver Spring closed in 2012, and the amount it billed its utility customers for, it actually had a decent year last year. The company recorded billings of $219 million for the nine months ended Sept 30, 2012, up from $183 million for the same period of 2011. Billings are how much Silver Spring invoiced its customers, and they are considered deferred revenue until they can be officially counted as revenue.

Silver Spring also had its highest gross margin to date on those billings of 34 percent. The company has a total of $473 million in deferred revenue as of the nine months ended September 30, 2012, and about $60 million in cash for the same period.

Will Silver Spring deliver a successful IPO in a difficult year for clean power and energy efficiency companies? SolarCity was able to go public in 2012 after its investors were able to negotiate the deal, but it was touch and go. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1
• Green IT Q4: solar, subsidies and the outlook for EVs
• Cleantech, meet connectivity: a new era of energy efficiency

Out of the hundreds of energy innovations on display this week at the annual ARPA-E Summit just outside of Washington D.C., it’s been rare to find a group actually selling and shipping products. But a startup out of Oakland, Calif. called Smart Wire Grid has quietly begun delivering devices that clamp onto transmission lines and control the flow of power, and it has scored some of the bigger names in the power company business. In a few weeks Smart Wire Grid plans to install its devices on the lines of power giant Southern Company, following a pilot installation of 99 of its devices on the lines of the federally-owned Tennessee Valley Authority.

Smart Wire Grid’s devices — called Distributed Series Reactors or DSRs — can be hooked onto transmission lines and signal to the electrons coming down the line to go elsewhere. It’s a similar concept to how internet infrastructure can allocate more bandwidth when needed or can smartly route around problem areas in the network.

For utilities, such technology can be a low cost way to push power to underutilized lines and to avoid over usage of certain lines that can lead to costly outages. The DSRs can also be networked with wireless technology to create a smart network of power flow and monitoring devices.

Smart Wire Grid’s Senior Engineer Andrija Sadikovic told me that while there are other ways for utilities to monitor and control the flow of power, the company’s devices are a super fast and super-low cost way to do it. It took less than four days to install the devices and fix TVA’s outage management problem, said Sadikovic. And after certain problems have been fixed for a section of the transmission line, utilities can move and reuse the devices on other lines. Smart Wire Grid founder Woody Gibson told a reporter last that year that the company was also having conversations with Bonneville Power Association for a pilot.

It’s probably not a shocker to anyone that it’s easier for startups selling smart-grid tech to reach commercialization, compared to the nuclear power projects or new battery makers hanging out at ARPA-E. While utilities aren’t the fastest moving customers, some of them are willing to test out and trial new IT-based software and hardware, particularly if it can reduce costs elsewhere and improve reliability.

Smart Wire Grid, which is utilizing technology developed at Georgia Tech University, was able to score a $4 million grant from ARPA-E for the pilot project with TVA. The pilot also included partners Boeing, and Carnegie Mellon University. The company will monitor the devices for a year and collect data about how they perform.

Smart Wire Grid closed on a $10 million round of equity financing from investors including new investor 3×5 Fund, which is backed by Arnerich Massena and Rivervest, along with Jane Capital. The company plans to raise another round later this year.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech
• Cleantech and investment in 2013
• The next generation of battery technology

Single sign-on. Universal log-in. It is the Holy Grail of Internet services. Coming into the new century, Microsoft planned to use Passport as a universal, single sign-on authentication system aligned with Windows. Following privacy group complaints, a Federal Trade Commission investigation and subsequent settlement, Microsoft backed off the authentication strategy. A decade later, Facebook emerged as contender; many sites or services request, and some even require, signing in with Facebook credentials. Twitter is another option, and there are other choices, such as OpenID.

Now Google comes calling, today adding Google+ Sign-In as an option developers can include with their apps. I cannot overstate just how bold and disruptive the authentication system could be, or how much Google could — scratch that, most likely will — benefit. If widely adopted, the service could, if nothing else, give Google+ huge lift against Facebook. Welcome to the social network wars, and my money is on the the big G winning because Android, search and other assets offer so much leverage.

Simply put: Google makes authentication a development platform tied to its social network and some other assets. Same can be said about Facebook, which offers authentication and apps platform. Both companies promise developers improved customer engagement and visibility over time.

The difference: Facebook apps run within the social network’s confines, although authentication reaches beyond and pulls users in. Google has Android, which is the dominant phone OS by huge margin, and extends the authentication platform to iOS, too. Combined, the two operating systems had 90.1 percent smartphone share during fourth quarter, based on actual sales, according to Gartner. Google+ Sign-In also supports web apps.

Successful platforms share six common traits:

• There are good development tools and APIs for easily creating applications
• There is at least one killer application people really want
• There is breadth of useful applications
• Third parties make lots of money
• The platform is broadly available
• There is a robust ecosystem

The most important is the fourth. Developers follow the money. Here Google uses one platform, social networking/authentication, to benefit another — mobile apps. The concept: Social engagement drives apps usage and sales, whether direct, additional or ancillary.

If developers sign on, they’re sure to drive more traffic to Google+, which isn’t good for Facebook. Likewise, the search giant offers an alternative to Facebook log-in for apps and some related services.

What You Get

Someone at Google thought out the benefits, by making Google+ Sign-In more than just another authentication mechanism. Among them:

• Support for two-step verification
• One-click install of Android apps from a website
• Interactive Google+ posts for sharing or buying apps
• Hangouts — and so video interaction — become part of apps

Two-step verification. “If you sign in to Gmail, YouTube or any other Google service, you can now use your existing credentials to sign in to apps outside of Google”, Seth Sternberg, Google+ director of Product Management, says about the basic concept. But there’s more, two-step verification, which while a hassle sometimes is an excellent safeguard against intruders. I have the mechanism enabled and recommend everyone using a Google Account to do likewise.

One-click install. “Many developers offer web and mobile versions of their app, yet setting things up across a browser, phone and tablet is still a major hassle”, Sternberg says. “When you sign in to a website with Google, you can install its mobile app on your Android device with a single click”. That means no link to Google Play that takes the user away.

Interactive posts. “When you share from an app that uses Google+ Sign-In, your friends will see a new kind of ‘interactive’ post in their Google+ stream”, Sternberg explains. “Clicking will take them inside the app, where they can buy, listen to, or review (for instance) exactly what you shared”. The developer benefits — and to the social mob — are obvious. Engagement for both, sales for the developer.

Embedded Hangouts. Already, Hangouts is one of the best Google+ features. Third-party apps run within the Hangout, and developers can place a button on their websites to take users to them.

Potential is big, but much depends on how Google executes on the promise and who actually adopts Google+ Sign-In. The demos do impress: Photo Hunt; Scott & Doodle.

Photo Credit: Fer Gregory/Shutterstock

Google is battling data protection authorities in Spain over whether or not search engines can be ordered to block search results that link to legal content on Spanish newspaper and government sites.

Google has a post on its Europe Blog today discussing the matter. William Echikson, Head of Free Expression, EMEA at Google writes:

In the case before the CJEU today – one that is representative of around 180 similar Spanish cases – Google declined to comply with an order from the Spanish Data Protection Authority. We were asked to remove links from our search results that point to a legal notice published in a newspaper. The notice, announcing houses being auctioned off as part of a legal proceeding, is required under Spanish law and includes factually correct information that is still publicly available on the newspaper’s website.

There are clear societal reasons why this kind of information should be publicly available. People shouldn’t be prevented from learning that a politician was convicted of taking a bribe, or that a doctor was convicted of malpractice. The substantive question before the Court today is whether search engines should be obliged to remove links to valid legal material that still exists online.

We believe the answer to that question is “no”. Search engines point to information that is published online – and in this case to information that had to be made public, by law. In our view, only the original publisher can take the the decision to remove such content. Once removed from the source webpage, content will disappear from a search engine’s index.

This has pretty much been the way Google has always operated. Here’s an explanation from Matt Cutts about why Google won’t remove pages about you.

Google is also facing antitrust issues in Europe, but according to a recent report, the European Commission will not reach a decision on that until at least August.

Anne Wojcicki, biologist and wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, attended an Oscar pre-party on Sunday, wearing Google Glass (a popular look within the family).

TMZ has put out video from the event, in which the reporter asks her to demonstrate the device, not realizing who she is. She demonstrates by taking her own video of the reporter, and sharing it with a friend before the reporter is even done with his own video.

More of the story at TMZ.

Another Wojcicki, Anne’s sister Susan, who is SVP of Advertising at Google, made some headlines today as well with the launch of new Google ad formats.

Apple (AAPL) is expected to sit atop the consumer electronics industry for quite some time to come, but the company’s stock continues to take a beating as growth inevitably slows and margins are squeezed. The latest ding to Apple shares came as Needam & Co. analyst Charlie Wolf lowered his price target from $750 to $710, citing a slowdown in iPhone sales growth and a crunch on iPad margins in the coming 12 months.

Continue reading…

Google announced Chrome 26 Beta today, with improved spell check capabilities. Google has refreshed the dictionaries the browser’s default spell check users, and it now supports proper nouns as well as Korean, Tamil and Albanian.

“Users who sync their settings will also notice their custom dictionary gets shared across devices now, so you won’t need to teach that new Chromebook how to spell your name,” says software engineer Rachel Petterson. “Furthermore, for users who have enabled the ‘Ask Google for suggestions’ spell check feature, we’re now rolling out support for grammar, homonym and context-sensitive spell checking in English, powered by the same technologies used by Google search. Support for additional languages is on the way.”

Google is pushing the update to users on Windows, Linux and Chrome OS in the coming weeks. Mac support will be on the way soon.

The browser update also have a bunch of new bells and whistles for developers, as discussed in this post on the Chromium blog.

Google announced two new ad offerings today: surveys and TrueView in AdMob and games. The announcements came as part of a speech from Google SVP, Advertising, Susan Wojcicki, at an IAB conference.

Of the surveys, she says:

It’s still too hard for brands to measure the impact of their display and video campaigns, beyond simple metrics like clicks and impressions. We’ve made a lot of headway in this area and we’re now starting to roll out surveys, to deliver a more effective way for marketers to easily measure the “brand lift” from their campaigns.

Advertisers will be able to run surveys to measure their display and video campaigns in AdWords, to better understand the impact of their ads in real-time. They can measure things like changes in the awareness of an upcoming movie, the recall of a new product name, intent to purchase a new cereal or the favorability of a particular brand. Businesses will be able to present consumers with an anonymous survey, to be shown days after they see an ad. Responses will be aggregated (and compared to a control group). With these results, brands can calibrate and optimize their online ad campaigns quickly and seamlessly. The rollout has started for marketers running video campaigns on YouTube and will be broadened to include display ad campaigns.

The surveys are powered by Google Consumer Surveys, which Google launched nearly a year ago.

Google is also bringing the skippable TruveView ad format to mobile apps in AdMob and to online games that utilize the Google Display Network. According to Wojcicki, the format has been very successful for YouTube.

Both the survey ads and the TrueView ads have already begun rolling out.

You can read more about the new formats and Wojcicki’s vision for where online advertising is headed in this Google+ post.

In the latest Webmaster Help video, Google’s Matt Cutts answers his own question:

Can you explain a little bit about the proposed “autocompletetype” attribute? Is this something I should add on my web forms?

“The basic idea is lots of websites have forms,” says Cutts. “You type in your name – your first name, your last name, your address, your street address, your postal code – all this sort of stuff. And it’s a real pain to fill out those forms. If you’re a business owner or a publisher, the easier you can make it to fill out those forms, the more likely it is that people will do purchases or sign up for your newsletter, or whatever it is that you’re interested in. So it’s highly recommended that you make it easy for people to fill out those forms.”

“You take your existing web form, and Google Chrome (hopefully other browsers will pick this up as well) has proposed a standard called ‘autocompletetype,’ so you can say, ‘autocomplete type is street address’,” he adds. “It doesn’t change your form elements. Your variables are still the same, so you’re only adding. It’s not as if any of your forms are going to break. But by annotating your forms with the correct type of thing that you expect people to fill in with the browser’s autocomplete, Chrome will know exactly how to fill out your forms.”

He says it’s a “tiny” amount of work, and as a result, users will “whisk” right through your form. There’s no down side, he says.

Also, for some reason, there’s a clip from a Who song at the end of the video.

Etsy announced today that is has redesigned the Activity Feed with what it calls “improvements in function and design”. It will be interesting to see if users agree with that sentiment.

The site has put greater emphasis on items, shops, and treasuries with bigger images and more items per page. There is also now one feed that combines the user’s activity and their followers’ activity.

Additionally, there is a designated shop feed for sellers, so you can see shop activity all in one place. This includes a notification number for new activity in the “Your Shop” tab.

Earlier this week, Etsy announced some new coupon codes.

Researchers at Brown University have built a robotic bat wing, which they believe can serve as as stepping stone toward some interesting new flying vehicles. Hopefully it won’t serve as a stepping stone to some giant bat-like Terminator.

Brown University explains:

The robot, which mimics the wing shape and motion of the lesser dog-faced fruit bat, is designed to flap while attached to a force transducer in a wind tunnel. As the lifelike wing flaps, the force transducer records the aerodynamic forces generated by the moving wing. By measuring the power output of the three servo motors that control the robot’s seven movable joints, researchers can evaluate the energy required to execute wing movements.

Testing showed the robot can match the basic flight parameters of bats, producing enough thrust to overcome drag and enough lift to carry the weight of the model species.

Hat tip to LiveScience

Apple (AAPL) shares got a boost Tuesday afternoon on rumors that the company may announce a split on Wednesday during its annual shareholder meeting. The rumor comes from former money manager and current TheStreet.com contributor Douglas Kass, who did not disclose his source. “High above the Alps my Gnome is hearing a rumor that Apple will announce a stock split at tomorrow’s shareholder meeting,” Kass wrote in a post on Twitter, providing no further details. Apple shares rose more than 1.4% on the rumor after nearing a new closing low.

The CEO of electric car maker Tesla, Elon Musk, said Tuesday that Tesla plans to cut in half the time it will take to pay back its loan to the Department of Energy. Musk made the remarks at the Department of Energy’s ARPA-E Summit in a discussion with DOE Secretary Steven Chu.

Musk said Tesla has ten years to pay back the $465 million loan, which it won back in the summer of 2009, and Tesla plans to reduce that time in half and get it repaid in under five years. Tesla already started paying back its loan, and made its first payment of $12.7 million to the DOE in the fourth quarter of 2012. It plans to make its second payment by March 2013.

During the discussion at ARPA-E, Musk said that if the DOE got so much attention for failures like Solyndra, it should get praise for its successes like Tesla.

Tesla has successfully been transforming from a small-scale electric car maker, into a company that’s producing its second electric car the Model S at a scale of 20,000 cars per year at a factory in Fremont, Calif. During the company’s earnings call last week, Tesla said it would turn its first profit ever (on a non-GAAP basis) in the first quarter of 2013. Musk said he was confident that Tesla could also be profitable for other quarters this year, too.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech
• Cleantech and investment in 2013
• Ups and downs for cleantech in Q1

Intel on Tuesday said it was getting into the software business with its own Hadoop distribution. The move is a potential blow for startups such as Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR that are offering their own distributions of Hadoop, but it’s also an admission by the chip vendor that the opportunity in big data isn’t only to be found in selling hardware.

In a conference held in San Francisco, VP and General Manager of Intel’s Datacenter Software Division Boyd Davis explained Intel’s history in Hadoop that stretches back to 2009 and stressed that Intel is going to share some aspects of its Hadoop distribution, but not all. Intel has a distribution of Hadoop it has released in China, but today it’s bringing it to the United States Intel’s version of the Hadoop distribution uses Hadoop 2.0 and YARN, which is a cutting-edge version of  platform compared with what most Hadoop users have deployed thus far.

Why Intel wants to push its own version of Hadoop

Boyd introduced partners such as and Cisco, which has tuned the Intel Hadoop distribution for its own servers. Intel also hosted a panel that included executives from SAP, Red Hat and Savvis to discuss the challenges of big data and the promise of Hadoop and big data.

Davis was up front about Intel’s rationale for releasing its own distribution, namely that it was worried about the fragmentation and possible uncertainty associated with current Hadoop distributions. That could be read as a dig against the many startups already offering Hadoop distributions, all of which are slightly different (of course, Intel’s will be slightly different, too). Like all of the existing players such as Cloudera and MapR, Intel will open source certain aspects of its distribution, but will also keep software to itself.

Inside the data center, it’s no longer just web servers that matter

For example, Davis stressed that Intel will not share its management and monitoring software, which could be highly valuable for enterprise customers. The Intel software could coordinate with Intel’s data center management software and make managing a variety of workloads easier. And hidden in that coordination might be one Intel’s aims in pushing its own version of Hadoop — the threat of ARM chips used in Hadoop clusters.

Dell, Calxeda and others are evaluating the use of lower-performance, lower-power chips in Hadoop clusters, a market Intel would hate to cede in the data center as data grows and analytics becomes more important. To that end, Intel has also optimized its Hadoop distribution for solid-state drives, something that other Hadoop companies haven’t done so far.

When asked about Atom and the use of lower-performance processors for Hadoop, Davis noted that while people are using lower-end processors for Hadoop , but that those uses tend to have slower networking. Davis says that when you combine high-end processors with 10 gigabit Ethernet and Hadoop, customers get the performance that they want.

So while Intel may tout stability and consistency as the reason for it’s decision to become a major player in the software market for big data, it’s also driven by the changes in the data center that threaten the grip Intel has on the hardware inside the data center. The cloud and big data has changed the workloads and hardware requirements for the data center and Intel is playing the long game in trying to release software that can be tuned to its chips.

The Hadoop drama isn’t over yet

Intel isn’t the only big vendor touting its own homegrown version of Hadoop. On Monday, EMC’s Greenplum division announced an entirely revamped version of its Hadoop distribution that’s merged with it’s flagship analytic SQL database. These big companies have big existing businesses to protect and lots of resources to put into doing it. As my colleague Derrick Harris wrote on the EMC news:

Looking past his competitive boasting, though, it’s easy to see [Greenplum’s Scott] Yara’s greater point when you ask him what all this Hadoop talks means for the data warehouse business on which Greenplum was built. He points to the mainframe business that fell from its high perch decades ago but still drives billions a year in revenue. A single MPP database system is still faster on certain workloads than SQL on Hadoop, but that gap will close over time and “I do think the center of gravity will move toward HDFS,” he said.

Hadoop is a juggernaut when it comes to big data. Intel is a juggernaut when it comes to data center infrastructure. Its decision to enter into the open source software market is a big one for the chip company, for the Hadoop ecosystem and for the myriad startups playing in this space. It’s a topic we’ll explore more during our Structure Data conference in New York on March 20 and 21.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Takeaways from the second quarter in cloud and data
• Infrastructure Q1: IaaS Comes Down to Earth; Big Data Takes Flight
• Why service providers matter for the future of big data

The more I use Google’s new Chromebook Pixel, the more I consider buying one; I have to return the loaner laptop next week. To many, that sounds insane: “Pay $1,299 for a browser?” is the common comment theme I’m seeing. And it’s a fair point if you do more than just work on the web. Even me, a Chromebook owner since last June, occasionally strays outside the Internet for some activity. Can that actually be done on a Chromebook Pixel? Actually, yes it can, because because you can use other operating systems on this hardware.

After researching over the weekend and asking some Googlers themselves, I found out that unlike prior Chromebooks, there is a BIOS option that is writable: meaning the Pixel’s startup software isn’t locked down as much as prior Chrome OS devices. Google included a copy of SeaBIOS with the Pixel, currently allowing for the installation of Linux distributions. Here’s an instruction page on how to do this and the following explanation from Bill Richardson, who works at Google:

“Chrome OS firmware normally consists of three distinct BIOS images. First, there is the read-only BIOS, which is (duh) read-only. It can’t be modified without disassembly. Then there are two read-write BIOS images, called RW A and RW B. The read-only BIOS is what runs when the machine is first powered on. It checks the two read-write BIOSes (A, then B), looking for one that is correctly signed by Google. If it finds one, it jumps to that image, which then looks for a valid kernel, and so forth. If there is no valid RW firmware (or some other fault has occurred), the execution stays in the RO BIOS and enters Recovery mode.

With the Pixel, we’d added an extra (unverified) BIOS slot. It only works in developer mode, and you have to explicitly enable it, but we’ve put a copy of Seabios in the Pixel firmware.”

The second option for running an alternative platform on the Pixel is a tool created by David Schneider, another Googler. Called crouton — standing for ChRomium Os UbunTu chrOot enviroNment — the downloadable tool supports running Ubuntu in a virtual instance within Chrome OS.

This means you can run the standard Chrome OS environment and a fully usable Ubuntu build at the same time. To toggle between the two environments, you simply press Ctrl-Alt-Refresh (F3) for Ubuntu or press Ctrl-Alt-Back (F1) for Chrome OS according to Richardson, who shared this picture of the end result.

Of course, if you want to run Mac OS X or Microsoft Windows, you’re out of luck on a Chromebook Pixel, but as a Googler reminded me in this thread, you can always use Chrome Remote Desktop to connect to another system. Bensen Leung, a Linux Kernel engineer on the Chrome OS team, told me he uses that method — in addition to the above Linux approaches — to connect to desktops on other platforms.

Are these ideal solutions for a laptop that costs $1,299 or more? Probably not for most folks, but they do provide options outside of just using a web browser.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The State of the Smartbook
• Life After Chrome: What’s Next for Android
• Google Chrome OS: More and Better Web Apps on The Way?

At Mobile World Congress, Andy Rubin, SVP of Mobile and Digital Content at Google (and co-founder of Android), shut down rumors that Google will be opening up retail stores.

Last week, 9to5Google put out a report indicating that Google would be opening its own retail stores by the end of the year. The report cited “an extremely reliable source”. According to Rubin, however, Google has no need to open stores, despite other indications that Google Glass will be widely available by the year’s end.

Ina Fried at All Things D shares some words from him:

“They don’t have to go in the store and feel it anymore,” Rubin said, during a roundtable with reporters on Tuesday. Plus, he said, the Google hardware effort is still in its infancy. “For Nexus, I don’t think the program is far enough along to think about the necessity of having these things in a retail store.”

As for whether Google as a whole might nonetheless be considering retail stores. “Google has no plans and we have nothing to announce,” he said.

Okay, the “nothing to announce” part is pretty commonplace regardless of whether or not the company actually has something in the works. The “Google has no plans” part seems a little bit more definitive.

Still, it doesn’t sound like the idea is totally ruled out for the future. Perhaps 9to5Google’s “extremely reliable source” is just off on the timeframe.

Despite Rubin’s comments, Google clearly has a number of items it could easily get into a retail store, and the company already has a presence in some Best Buys and PCWorld/Dixon’s stores.

Plus, as Google Retail Industry Director Todd Pollak recently said, “The lines between online and offline shopping experiences are blurring.”

Update: 9to5Google’s Seth Weintraub now has this to say:

I reported last week that Google had plans to open retail stores within the year, which according to a quick ping of that same source, is still on. When asked about Rubin’s comments, I was told that Rubin wasn’t being forthcoming or AllThingsD misquoted him.

…

It should be noted that the retail program is being born (we’re told) out of Google’s (X) labs under Sergey Brin and not out of the Android group and the two groups aren’t always in full cooperation

The rumor continues…