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I am still homeless (most of the time), and living on @Airbnb. Permanent residences are for families.

AirBnB CEO & co-founder Brian Chesky via Twitter

A video conversation with Brian Chesky from our archives:

Over past few days I have been dealing with a flu-gone-wild. It is not exactly the way I wanted to spend my days, but sometimes cold happens. The good news, if there can be any, is that I had a lot of time on my hands to watch a lot of video. In my case it is usually one of the four shows: Wallander, Sherlock Holmes (with Jeremy Brett), Poirot and House M.D. It is mostly House MD, because well, I am a House MD junkie.

As luck would have it, I was watching season one (for probably the 25th time) and came across  probably my favorite episode — DNR– where John Henry Giles, a saxophonist, falls sick. He goes to the hospital. There is a lot of drama, and somewhere along the way he tells Dr. House:

The reason normal people got wives and kids and hobbies, whatever. That’s because they don’t got that one thing that hits them that hard and that true. I got music, you got this. The thing you think about all the time, the thing that keeps you south of normal. Yeah, makes us great, makes us the best. All we miss out on is everything else.

One Thing

When I look back at my own life as a writer, I somehow related to that “one thing” theory. Sometimes I wonder if that is my curse. But mostly I think of it as my blessing. Thinking, obsessing, composing — writing it all down on crevices of my brain before putting it to paper (or computer.) There are days when I fall asleep thinking about a story, only to find the entire story appearing magically which I am asleep and getting up in the middle of the night and writing it all down on a piece of paper that always is next to my bed. It is a process that is all-consuming.

It is that “one thing” that made me read and re-read magazines, books and anything I could get my hands of in the 1980s India and learn how to write. Not just write, but think and write and write. It mattered to me more than anything — love, family, home and even my own identity.

I didn’t do it because I thought I would make some money or get paid to do it. Thirty-five years later, I still do it because I don’t really have a choice, because I don’t really know any other way. Writing, painting, creating –creators don’t do it because they want to make money. Creativity is not a profession, it is a gift. It was, is and always will be a very selfish act.

And the reason why I bring this up is because of the raging debate around writers, freelancers and how they are getting paid. I am bringing this up because of all the handwringing about the changing landscape. When I see all the arguments — whether it is Nate Thayer’s story about The Atlantic editor asking him to write for free in exchange for exposure, or The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal’s story of being a digital editor/writer or Felix Salmon’s unvarnished truth about the problems of online journalism – I empathize with each and every one of them. (My colleague Mathew Ingram has his nuanced take on the situation, and is worth reading.)

End of freelance?

Why? Because I sat on all four sides of this table. I have been an unpaid freelancer. I was a mistreated poorly paid staffer. And I was also employed by a magazine that was gorging at the dot-com orgy. And thanks to a lucky set of circumstances, I have been an employer. I have written for the paper and I have written for digital. I have been paid and I have been the payer. I have been a writer and a businessman.

What my changing roles have made me aware of is the reality of today’s media business (something we’ll be talking about at our paidContent Live conference on April 17 in New York). Back in the day when it was an all- print business, the newspapers were always looking for ways to fill pages to support more advertising. More advertising meant more broadsheets to fill and more money to spend on whatever went next to advertising.

Magazines charged a heck-of-a-lot more money than papers. The more ads they sold, the more money they doled out to the writers. If I remember, one of the Red Herring issues in 2000 put Bride magazine to shame. It was full of so many ads that I had to work on four stories for the issue — just to support the advertising. I was not privy to the freelance budget but the freelancers at Red Herring were getting paid quite handsomely. Then, advertising vanished and so did the freelance money and eventually the publications themselves.

In other words, the spending on editorial was in direct correlation with the advertising dollars. Today, the ad dollars are hard to find, both in print and on the web. Sure, more dollars are being shoveled towards online properties, but then there are more zebras around this pond. Media publications are fighting with YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Google and Amazon for ad dollars. But, then you knew that already.

Frankly, it sucks. Not just sucks, it royally sucks. It boils my blood just thinking about the changes — but change it is and one has to live with it. And that is the biggest reality of our times.  Maybe the reality of this post-blogging, post-Twitter world where words exist for mere minutes, freelance writing isn’t an option anymore. As Felix Salmon so eloquently writes:

The lesson here, then, is not that digital journalism doesn’t pay. It does pay, and often it pays better than print journalism. Rather, the lesson is that if you want to earn money in digital journalism, you’re probably going to have to get a full-time job somewhere.

My personal view, shaped by the my own experience, is that if you are going to take freelance contributions, then pay something — just as a sign of respect (if not the true worth) of a writer’s capability.

We have used freelance writers in the past and have always paid them — not a lot because we didn’t have a lot — but then we came to the conclusion that it didn’t really make sense in today’s always-on, constantly updating media ecosystem. We tried the monthly contract model but in the end decided that we want to adopt an in-house model. Today we have a few guest writers who write because of their love of our site and they do it for free. But we are still a team of our own.

Brave old (new) world

The reasons are actually pretty simple. Our roots are in blogging and we have a certain view of the world. In order to keep a consistent voice (not editorial style), we need to have a team that has an ability to look at the world through the same lens. That identifies us to our community of readers and it also helps us stay true to who we are and what we believe in. And most importantly it allows us to build a metabolic rate that suits us and create products that make sense to us.

We know that advertising isn’t the golden gateway, so we decided to go the way of paid content via our research business. And because we don’t put all our eggs in advertising, it means that we don’t have to be beholden to the heroin of page views and pray at the temple of traffic.  Others chose to do things differently — but we have decided to go down a different path.

Tomorrow, if they take everything away from me — the company, the job, the fame, the money — and leave me with a piece of paper. I know I will be 15 again, I will still write. And I still will have a reason to live. Just like Nate, Alexis, Felix and every other writer who gets up every morning to do that one thing… just one thing.

Continue reading…

Facebook engineers posted more details Wednesday on the back end of its Graph Search function, showing how the social network assigns numbers to users, places and other reference points and then lets users form queries and find answers using those numbers.

Unicorn, the software and search engine that makes Graph Search possible for at least hundreds of thousands of users, starts by giving every user a number. In the example cited by Facebook Engineering in a blog post, a fictitious person named David has a number, or fbid, of 10003. His home, New York, is 111. And “Downton Abbey,” a television show David has liked on Facebook, is 222. Friends of David get called up with the search term “friend:10003.” People who live in New York are at “lives-in:111,” and people who like “Downton Abbey” live at “like:222.” Put those three strings together, and you’ll get other friends of David who live in New York and like “Downton Abbey.”

In each search string, sequence is important. The post states that Unicorn serves up quick results by quantifying the importance of each element of a search string and then sequencing those elements in order of importance. But at a whiteboard session last month at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., Facebook engineers said they want to automate the process of flipping around users’ search strings to trigger better search results. It’s one of a handful of things the engineers are looking to do to further improve Graph Search in order to live up to the company’s lofty goals for it, as I reported after attending the whiteboard session.

New likes per day alone number more than 2.7 billion, according to Wednesday’s blog post. At that rate, the number of possible fbids clearly will continue to grow, and the search strings will get longer, too. Turning out good search results in a couple of seconds could become more of a challenge.

It’s a good thing Facebook is innovating on the hardware side through the Open Compute Project. That work could become a higher priority if Facebook grows at a faster clip, although at least a few users are quitting for a slew of reasons.

Wednesday’s post does not mention advancements on Graph Search since the whiteboard session, even though the engineers said they would improve Graph Search in the months ahead.

Facebook engineers work with big data sets in several other ways, often with Hadoop. Facebook’s engineering manager of analytics infrastructure, Ravi Murthy, will moderate a panel on the future of Hadoop and business intelligence at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference in New York in two weeks.

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Barely a year into their existence, massive open online course (MOOC) providers, like Coursera EdX and Udacity, are starting to offer certificates that can be put toward university credit. But are full MOOC degrees on the horizon?

When asked that question by New York Times education reporter Laura Pappano on stage at the SXSWedu education technology conference in Austin Wednesday, Coursera co-founder Andrew Ng gave the diplomatic reply:

“Coursera isn’t a university. We don’t offer degrees of academic credit. We’re a humble hosting platform.”

To which Anant Agarwal, president of the nonprofit EdX, quipped: “a very politically correct answer” (drawing a round of laughter from the audience).

Ng’s response was hardly surprising given Coursera’s reliance on university partners, including Princeton, Brown and 60 other institutions, to populate its site with courses.

The startup wouldn’t be much of a partner if it planned to take on academia with a degree of its own. But just because Coursera says it doesn’t intend to issue degrees or their equivalent, it doesn’t mean that others don’t eventually plan to do just that.

Reacting to Ng’s comment, Degreed, a startup that scores and validates learning from all kinds of educational sources, tweeted:

Whole MOOC degrees? “No”. Well… Why not? Response lacks spine or forward thinking. Hard to imagine it won’t happen. #sxswedu #MOOC

— degreed (@hackingedu) March 6, 2013

Building on the rise of nonaccredited courses from sources like the MOOC providers and iTunesU, Degreed’s premise is that as people build skills through informal education providers, they will need an alternative to the traditional degree. Although they don’t share Degreed’s ambitions for “jailbreaking” the college degree, startups LearningJar and Smarterer similarly aim to assess informal education.

After the onstage conversation, Agarwal told me on the sidelines that he believes that pure MOOC degrees are on their way.

“Universities are already giving full degrees for online education, for distance online education, so what is different? Extension school programs and online programs are already giving full degrees. So why is this anything special?,” he said.

EdX, like Coursera, he emphasized, doesn’t want to be a university — “it’s a platform, a portal and a community.” But in the next year, schools will step forward to accept credit equivalency from MOOC providers and some may be willing to award full degrees from credits accrued on those sites, he said. In addition, as the entire value of a traditional degree comes under increased scrutiny, other companies outside academia could step in to validate and provide degree equivalents.

But even if MOOC-providers like Coursera and EdX are opening the door to alternatives to the traditional university degree, founders of both organizations said they rejected disruptive innovation expert and Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen’s assessment that half of universities may be bankrupt in the next fifteen years.

“I think that would be a tragedy,” said Ng. “I think that there’s something very important, almost sacred about the student-professor relationship.” Instead of online education leading to the replacement of brick-and-mortar education, Ng said his belief is that MOOCs will have the biggest impact on working adults who don’t have a college degree and can use Coursera (or Udacity or EdX) courses to earn credits that they can put towards traditional degrees.

Agarwal said, “I love Clay Christensen but he’s just flat out wrong.”

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There’s very little to be said about this viral video except that it’s a cute rendition of what will happen for maybe the first two weeks after Google Glass is launched. In fact, I suspect it will almost be impossible to get away with this stuff once Glass hits its tipping point as potential dates will be wary of your motives when you blurt out “Google Jennifer Swanson” before sipping your latte.

Imagine this dystopian future: You enter a bar on a date, spend a little time in awkward conversation, and then, bored, both of you end up staring at the readouts near your corneas, oblivious to each other. The birth-rate will fall. There will be anti-Glassites who snatch these things from people’s faces and there will be Glass-free zones where orgiastic explorations of the human animal will take place with reckless abandon for you will finally be free. Free! Men and women will be reduced to zombies, wandering aimlessly as texts scroll past their eyes like flies on a dead cow’s face. Slowly, surely, our major cities will descend into lethargy and a group of Luddites will arise to fill the vacuum. The Glassites will be pacified by porn piped right into their heads while the rest of the world – the dreamers, the drinkers, and the astigmatics – will take the reins. One day a nuclear dirty bomb, built using instructions found on the Internet by a Glassite who was vaguely upset with his score in Angry Birds Glass, will destroy most of the Northeast, and Glassites will descend into rabid madness as the media hubs of the world grind to a halt. With no more Reddit or BuzzFeed, Glassites will wake up from their slumbers, their atrophied bodies limp as old spinach. But by that time it will be too late. The anti-Glassites will rule the world, their Amish-like refusal to take up technology their only protection against the tyranny of Mother Google. They will rebuild civilization in their own image, which means there will be a lot of board games and barbecues.

Or maybe Glass will end up like the Segway – kind of cool, but vaguely useless. Who knows? What am I? A mind reader?

Today is the one-year anniversary of the Google Play store and the company celebrates with a big sale. However, things may not all be balloons and ribbons in Android land. Something darker lurks just beneath the surface of Google’s Android marketplace.

Brian Krebs, a former Washington Post reporter who now writes a security blog, found a bit of information that could make your hair curl. Krebs makes a habit of hanging out on the seedy side of the web and he recently hit potential paydirt, encountering a new botkit that is making the rounds and leverages actual verified accounts from the marketplace to trick users into downloading phony banking applications. Krebs spotted a developer purchasing verified Google Play accounts for $100 each on an underground forum.

According to Krebs, “Google charges just $25 for Android developers who wish to sell their applications through the Google Play marketplace, but it also requires the accounts to be approved and tied to a specific domain. The buyer in this case is offering $100 for sellers willing to part with an active, verified Play account that is tied to a dedicated server”.

The malware, which goes by the name ‘Perkele’ does not appear to be overly sophisticated as far as a modern mobile malware app goes, but it is still being endorsed by buyers.

Krebs explains how the new malware works: “When the victim goes to log in to their bank account at their PC, the malware Web inject informs the victim that in order to complete the second, mobile authentication portion of the login process, the user will need to install a special security certificate on their phone. The victim is then prompted to enter their mobile number, and is sent an SMS or HTTP link to download the mobile malware”.

While many of us may pause at such a prompt, average users likely would not. Especially given today’s two-factor authentication that a growing number of sites require — for some reason Google just prompted me to enter a code texted to my phone this morning when I first logged into my account.

Is there something to worry about? Likely not, but it is reason to be cautious, but then again there is always reason for that. If an app prompts you to do something out of the ordinary then go directly to the website — type the URL into your browser — do not click a link. Check it out before you go any further. I know it sounds paranoid but, as the old saying goes, better safe than sorry.

Photo Credit: koya979/Shutterstock

Path launched its third version on Wednesday, and this time, it’s all about the messages.

In the new version, Path messages take advantage of the fact that as our phones have become capable of much more than transmitting voice and text, traditional SMS has become fairly outmoded. People are looking for ways to communicate with richer features than just the letters of the alphabet. So the company is introducing a much more full-featured messaging option along with the third version of its social network, and pretty much everything you’d want is there.

For a company that’s known for its design, some of the features will look different from what users are used to. But in meetings in San Francisco last week ahead of Wednesday’s launch, Path designers said they view the addition of large emojis they’re calling “stickers” as a new kind of digital art — a kind that hopefully, users will pay for.

There’s text, of course, but it’s the other features that kick it over the top: the large emojis called stickers, the ability to quickly insert a pin on a map to show where you are or want to go, voice recording features, the ability to import or snap photos, music, movies, and a few others. It’s all the features you might screenshot or explain with words, but available at the tap of a button.

“I think it’s a typical Path swiss army knife,” said Nate Johnson, Path’s VP of marketing. “You can do a lot of different things with it. And it helps that we have the list of your closest friends sitting right there.”

Path to success?

The question for Path is whether a robust messaging feature add to the network’s appeal and either draw in new users or bring back those who have lapsed?

The company recently hit 6 million registered users, and Johnson said that for most people, once they get past the initial hurdle of understanding how to use the app, adoption is quick.

For Path, the addition of stickers is interesting, because not only does it infuse the app with a new set of aesthetics and graphic artists who might not necessarily work for the company, it gives a hint at where the company’s monetization strategy is headed.

Users will receive two “packs” of stickers for free. Each pack includes somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 to 18 images, depending on the pack, and the free sets take the classic Path smiley face (named Jack, apparently), and gives him a whole set of new updates. There’s party Jack, with a beer mug, developer Jack, with a 5 o’clock shadow and Red Bull, sleepy Jack with a robe and coffee mug, and more than 30 other images.

Path is betting that within messages, the popularity of emoji-like images are the kinds of things that consumers will want to pay for under a freemium model.

“The philosophy here is to build things that people want to pay for,” Johnson said. “It’s not to put in advertising. The spirit of this is that we think there’s a better way to make money. And that’s what we’re tyring to do.”

Design uber alles

Path is known for its design – the company has worked hard to create a strong feeling in the app through attention to detail and careful consideration of all elements. From the shading on the buttons to the way certain features fade out when you look at a photo, it’s small things coming together that make it an attractive app to use. But with the addition of large emojis, or stickers, the company is detouring a little from its established look, and banking on consumer delight to promote a new kind of design.

“I feel like in this day and age, anyone can be self-taught and design something that looks good. But there’s so much thinking behind our product,” said Jenny Ji, design director at Path.

The company is now rolling out “stickers” which are basically huge emojis for use in messaging. Emojis on steroids, maybe. At first glance they don’t really fit with Path’s carefully orchestrated red and yellow aestictic. The stickers come in a variety of styles, and most are goofy in nature and garish in color.

But key designers at Path said that they’re persuaded the new stickers will not only provide some revenue for the company, but will provide greater joy to the consumers and change how we consider digital art.

The company worked with external artists to create each of the sticker sets or “packs,” and when users tap on a sticker pack to purchase, they’ll see the designers name and bio, making it seem like youer’ purchasing a gallery of hand-crafted pieces of art, rather than smiling dog images.

“Each of these packs, there’s a theme around it,” said Dustin Mierau, co-founder and head of design. “So we’re really asking is, ‘What do you want the pack to allow you to communicate? Like this one is about friendship and love, so my wife and I send these back and forth quite a bit.”

“We don’t want people to have to type,” Mierau said. ”Typing is probably the worst part of messaging today. Usually it’s typing to coordinate or do things, so we want to bring in the tools that make it easier. With one tap, I’m saying something more meaningful. It’s a whole phrase. That’s how we see stickers, it’s entire phrases wrapped up in one tap. It’s like the map of saying where I am. It’s this whole giant interaction wrapped up in one path moment.”

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Over Christmas, a friend and I were discussing the multitude of social media options we face on a daily basis. We asked each other a question: Which social network would you be willing to delete today and would never miss?

Facebook might seem like the obvious target for anyone threatening to quit a social service, and the site’s irritating qualities are more than well-documented. Ads for Budweiser are obnoxious, Spotify notifications are spammy, and figuring out the privacy settings can sometimes require a PhD. The company hides your updates in favor of ads (maybe?). People over-share.

But despite the naysayers, I do still keep a Facebook tab open on my browser throughout the day, and I’ve found that without my noticing, it provides a significant portion of my daily media diet. For me, it’s still far behind Twitter in terms of usefulness. But even with the service’s many flaws, it enjoys some advantages.

The company is set to announce a re-design of the newsfeed on Thursday, and while it would be easy to list all the things it should add or improve, instead, here are the three things the company should emphasize.

In other words: Zuck, don’t break these:

• Content discovery: Facebook is still one of the best places to find the articles people are talking about and sharing that I might have missed at the time they were published. So many other news services and social products like Twitter are chronological, and in the speed of today’s digital world, it’s easy to miss things when they happen. I still look to Facebook to see the Buzzfeed story that’s trending (I think that’s how I learned what Harlem Shake was) or discover the local news item that’s outraging people. People criticize the black box of Facebook’s algorithm, and it surely has its flaws, but I’ve found that it’s still better than any news reader out there for surfacing things people are talking about.
• Visual media: Despite Twitter’s efforts to integrate Vine, photo filters, and expanded tweets into its stream, Facebook remains the better platform for sharing anything with a visual component. As the Instagram purchase showed, Facebook’s sweet spot still lies with photos, and naturally stalking a friend’s photos remains a key element to the experience for most people. But even beyond that, the newsfeed is well-positioned to highlight content with photos, graphs, charts, or videos, and hopefully the re-design will take advantage of this element.
• Contact directory: I’m not sure this is something Facebook could necessarily make or break with the newsfeed re-design, but in an informal survey of friends on what they like most about the service, they said Facebook is still the largest directory that most people have for their digital acquaintances. Allowing users to maintain this directory without cluttering the newsfeed with useless updates through functions like “hide from newsfeed” are a good start — the site should remain interesting, even if your Facebook friends aren’t.

I’ll be live-blogging Facebook’s announcement tomorrow from its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. starting at 10am PT.

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Europe’s policy makers face a dilemma. They have to collectively cut energy consumption across the continent by 2020, yet the various industries that need to reduce wasteful consumption significantly, from IT to transportation, aren’t doing enough. Part of the challenge includes figuring out the best ways to build and run data centers.

“I don’t want to say this, but … we are panicking a bit,” said Colette Maloney, head of European Commission’s smart cities and sustainability unit, during the Green Grid Forum in Santa Clara, Calif., on Wednesday. “We are way off target.” The commission aims to see its member countries cut their energy use by 20 percent — compared to the 2005 levels — by 2020, and the European Union has only hit a 13 percent reduction.

To meet its 2020 target, the commission is counting on the information and communication technology industry to do its part, and is focusing attention on data centers in particular, given that data centers account for about 25 to 30 percent of the energy use by the IT industry, Maloney said.

CTO, Verne Global, Tate Cantrell and Eirikur Hrafnsson, Founder GreenQloud at Structure Europe 2012

Not only that, the number of data centers will likely mushroom if the idea of “smart cities” becomes a reality. The term is really about the use of technology to help people use and manage resources – from water and power to transportation and communication systems – much more efficiently (see  this GigaOm Pro report, subscription required, called “Key technologies for the future of the smart city”). Using sensors to collect data and computers to analyze and disseminate them will be a big part of running a smart city, and that will require the construction of more data centers.

Figuring out how to measure and analyze energy savings and what data is acceptable to use for those calculations are among the big challenges for making data centers more efficient, Maloney said. And getting at least the majority of the IT industry to agree to a set of methods and data won’t be easy. The commission has been working with many companies and trade associations, but they haven’t reached a happy compromise yet. Implementing those standards once they are set will pose a new challenge, she noted.

Some of the standard-setting industry organizations are looking to adopt rules for promoting energy savings. The Green Grid, an IT industry association, came up with PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) to gauge the energy efficiency of data centers. Companies such as Google have promoted the use of PUE, which has some notable limitations.­­ EBay has a new metric for the MPG of a data center, too.

Maloney said PUE is useful, but the commission is looking at other metrics as well, especially since it wants to promote new business opportunities while achieving its energy savings target. Some of the opportunities it hopes to promote will involve making and selling efficient equipment and related services, but what constitutes green products and services has yet to be clearly defined.

In the mean time, the commission is funding research projects, such as Fit4Green and All4Green, that will come up with new ways to run data centers more efficiently. Later this year, the commission plans to call for research proposals on building and running green data centers in smart cities, Maloney said.

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After more than 13 years of research convinced him that children have the ability to learn almost anything on their own, 2013 TED Prize winner Sugata Mitra aspires to shape the future of learning by building a School in the Cloud, helping kids “tap into their innate sense of wonder.”

In the spirit of Mitra’s invitation to the world to “ask kids big questions, and find big answers,” we asked four brilliant young people to tell us: What do you think is the future of learning?

Here, their answers.

Adora Svitak, 15-year-old writer, teacher and activist

“One of the most powerful shifts in the future of education will come from not only the tools at our disposal, but from an underutilized resource: the students whose voices have for too long been silent. We’re increasingly pushing for seats at the decision-making tables, empowering ourselves by shaping our own learning, and taking on activist roles both online and off. To me, this signals one of the most hopeful signs of the future of education — the shift from a top-down, learning-everything-from-the-authority-figure approach to an approach characterized by peer-to-peer learning, empowerment  and grassroots change.”

Watch Adora’s talk to discover “What adults can learn from kids” »

Kid President, 10-year-old inspiration machine

“My older brother and I believe kids and grown ups can change the world. We’re on a mission with our web series, Kid President, to do just that. If every classroom in the world could be full of grownups and kids working together, we’d live in a happier world. Kids want to know about the world and about how they can make an impact. Kids also have ideas. It’d be awesome if teachers and students could work together and put these ideas into action. There should be lessons in things like compassion and creativity. If those two things were taught more in schools we’d see some really cool things happen.”

Watch Kid President’s inspiring “pep talk” for the world »

Ying Ying Shang, 16-year-old blogger, teen advisor to the UN Foundation, and SPARK Movement activist

“For most of my life, the media has been a constant presence, whether it’s in the form of a TV droning in the background or the billboards that whiz by on the highway or the never-ending barrage of sounds and images on social media. That’s why I know the importance of learning media literacy early. It’s so important that the power of the media be recognized, both in its capacity for sexualization and distortion of reality, as well as its capacity to be harnessed for good.

Also, it seems inevitable that future educators will turn to online learning tools, replacing blackboards with smartboards and note packets with YouTube videos. In the wake of this shift, analysis and critical thinking skills should be taught more than ever in classrooms.”

Read Ying Ying’s blogs about creating healthy media and ending the sexualization of women and girls »

Thomas Suarez,13-year-old app developer and founder of Carrot Corp, Inc.

“The future of education should include programming as a major subject. The class will allow students to collaborate on code, teach each other, and communicate outside of the classroom using services such as Google+. This way, students will think more during other classes, be much more likely to get a job and, most important, have fun.”

Watch Thomas’s talk and learn about how he taught himself to build iPhone apps »

Join the conversation! What do you think is the future of learning? Tell us in the comment section below.

One year ago, March 6, 2012, Google renamed Android Market, and nothing is the same sense. The rebranded Google Play pushed forward a transition started in November 2011, with the broad expansion of content beyond apps. The name change also represented something bigger, shift in emphasis away from broader Android to the search giant’s siloed services and brands. Google sought to imitate Apple while tackling wild Amazon.

On Play’s first birthday, Google Android — not the skinned software Amazon, HTC, LG, Samsung and others ship — is a 98-pound weakling gone super steroids. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company sells apps, ebooks, gift cards, magazines, music, movies, TV shows and devices through the online store. There were no devices available a year ago, but now accessories, Chromebooks, smartphones and tablets. Three different computers are available, including the new and Google-branded Chromebook Pixel. Also: Two different Nexus 4 smartphones and Nexus 10 tablets and three Nexus 7 slates — four if counting 32GB HSPA+ models twice, with different cellular SIMs.

I can’t overstate what Play means to Google, and possibly to you. The store anchors a broader strategy to build out an end-to-end hardware, software and services platform rivaling Apple’s and keeping runaway successes like Amazon and Samsung from gaining too much influence over the entire Android ecosystem. Google is 1 and 0 — win against the retailer, but not the electronics manufacturer.

Looked at differently, Play, the devices and all that curated content is about selling a Google lifestyle. The “Market” was all about an Android lifestyle. The rebranding and everything that followed dramatically shifted the digital lifestyle focus to Google.

Android runs Aground

A year ago, Android was lost at sea, with several captains’ mates at the wheel struggling to steer in different directions. Amazon looked to fracture the Android tablet market with its highly-customized OS and compelling curated experience matching Apple’s and, in some respects, exceeding it.

Meanwhile, Samsung sold so many Android phones, influence grew organically fast. Neither company offered then, as now, the newest Android version on most devices — and none without some changes. Heck, Amazon ships its own web browser on Kindle tablets. I warned 11 months ago: “Google has lost control of Android“.

Around the same time, Forrester Research predicted that proprietary Android versions, like Amazon’s, would surpass the Google Android ecosystem by 2015. Such circumstance would likely fracture the open-source platform into multiple fatally fragmented Android ecosystems. Beyond development, Google wasn’t really follower or leader, but surely destined for the rocks with the likes of Amazon steering the ship to self-interest rather than destination entire ecosystem.

Play represents leadership, taking charge — one of several coordinated actions that put Google at the helm of good ship Android. Even if some partners leave the vessel for their own destinations, a core Android ecosystem will steam ahead. The OS technically still is open source, but the major benefits are Google’s and put the company at the forefront of the new computing era, rather than sinking with the old one.

Meet Appooglesoft

Look at the change! Google sits on atop a platform that looks like an Apple-Microsoft hybrid. The fruit-logo company develops everything important for its core ecosystem, selling a curated and integrated hardware-software-services stack. Sure there are third-party apps and physical goods, like cases and peripherals. But Apple controls the core.

Microsoft, by contrast, sells and licenses software, while more recently expanding to services and dabbling in hardware. The two models are almost mirror images. Apple makes most money from stuff it sells directly. Microsoft primarily profits from products other people sell. If there is no OEM-made hardware, Microsoft software sells to no one.

Google gives away Android for free, but benefits indirectly from attached products and services on devices third parties sell. There, the licensing model resembles Microsoft’s. But now with Play and all those devices, Google also has established, in less than 12 months, something that looks lots like Apple end-to-end, too. In many ways, Google has created an ecosystem and supporting platform that is the best of what both Apple and Microsoft offer. Google Play is a critical component to making the strategy work.

You must understand, and many of you will disagree, people don’t buy products. They buy brands. Such as Amazon, Apple or Samsung — Kindle Fire, iPhone or Galaxy S III. Android by itself, with lots of would-be captains wrestling the rudder, is not strong enough brand, particularly if Google wants to be a player in the so-called post-PC — or what I call the cloud-connected or contextual cloud computing — era. Google Play is critical to that end, and by no means the most important. But the store is the most visible piece, as that’s where people go to buy the stuff supporting the Google lifestyle — what Google doesn’t give away with Android.

A year later, people who want stock Android can purchase a Nexus device directly from Google at Play — one that feels like buying something from Apple. Hardware, software and services integration is tight. Digital content is available in all major categories and there is deep social sharing built in, whether Google+ or support for other services. Google and its sub-brands are front, center and behind — all around. Play is an integral part of promoting the Google lifestyle, something more tenuous in March 2012 than it is today.

Photo Credit: Elena Schweitzer/Shutterstock

Will the smartphone really be the only device you use to connect to the world around you? Or will objects like the Nike Fuelband, the TeleSound speaker or the Kindle also have a place in your device pantheon? Dave Merrill, the CEO of Sifteo (see disclosure) who spoke at the GigaOM internet of things meetup last week, thinks the “giant slab of glass” represented by the smartphone will be crucial, but it won’t be our only device.

For many of us this might be an obvious realization, even though the smartphone has mooted gizmos like digital recorders, personal navigation systems, music players, guitar tuners and even books. Yet Merrill attempts to define what kinds of characteristics our future devices must have to retain our attention (and get us to shell out the big bucks to buy them). Like the many specialty tools used by carpenters, our future gadgets will evolve to fill specialized needs and will connect us to what we are manipulating — digital bits. Watch the video below.

If you liked this talk, check out the others here or here, or come to our next Internet of Things meetup in Boulder, Colo. next week.

Disclosure: Sifteo is backed by True Ventures. True Ventures is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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