Google to bid for spectrum

Google's interest in the 700MHz spectrum auction has not been a secret. Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said back in August that the company would "probably" bid in the auction, and Google announced several weeks ago that it was preparing all the necessary materials to make a bid. Now, at last, Google is making it officially official.

The company will file the required documents with the FCC on December 3, but the documents will remain confidential and Google won't speak further about the issue in public. That's due to FCC anti-collusion rules that prohibit bidders from discussing strategy with each other in private or through public channels.

Chris Sacca, Google's head of special initiatives, stressed again in a blog post what Google has been saying throughout the year: "open access" rules on some of the spectrum will make this auction one of the most important in recent memory.

So long as the $4.6 billion reserve price on the 22MHz of C block spectrum is met, the auction winner must support any application running on any device across the network it eventually builds. Should that reserve threshold not be met, however, the spectrum will be auctioned again, this time without the rules in place. Google's presence in the auction should ensure that the auction exceeds the reserve, as the company is unlikely to let the bidding remain under the reserve price unless Google is wining the auction.

Assuming that the bids exceed the reserve, though, it's not clear yet that Google's interest lies in owning spectrum and building out a major wireless network. Google has already had great success with its lobbying efforts, in large part being responsible for getting the FCC to impose the open access rules in the first place. The pressure of the auction has already led Verizon Wireless to

Is all of this enough for Google, or does the company truly want to win a chunk of spectrum? We won't know for a while. Although the auction starts on January 24, 2008, bidding could last several months before a winner is announced.

Google announces mobile phone OS, Android

The Google Phone has arrived, sort of, but not in the long-rumored embodiment that many had expected. Google announced this morning that it has developed a new mobile OS called "Android"—a result of its acquisition of a mobile software company of the same name in 2005—that will allow the company to get Google's mobile apps into as many hands as possible starting in mid-2008. Android is Linux-based and open source, and aspects of the platform will be made available to handset manufacturers for free under the Apache license.

Google's handset partners upon launch will include Motorola, HTC, Samsung, and LG, confirming many of the recent rumors that Google would not be developing the hardware on its own. Google has a number of carrier partners worldwide as well, such as T-Mobile and Sprint in the US, T-Mobile/Deutsche Telekom in Europe, and China Mobile in China, to name a few. The whole thing comes as part of the Open Handset Alliance—also announced by Google today.

Google has chosen to launch Android in this way is because it wanted to put its focus on the platform for development of its mobile applications. Although Java is widely available on many handsets worldwide, it still operates differently from phone to phone and can't provide the type of flexibility that Google wants for itself and its partners. In addition to rolling out its own suite of mobile apps, Google also plans to make a "full" SDK for Android available next week, making the platform even more attractive to third-party developers (and perhaps delivering a slight ice burn to Apple on the side). And the more third-party apps there are available for the platform, the more attractive it will be for customers.

One obvious goal of Google's is to create not only a platform for its mobile apps, but for its mobile advertising platform. However, Google said during its press conference this morning that we "won't see a completely ad-driven cell phone for some time." Android and Google's mobile ad platform is still young though, and the two will likely evolve together over time.

Java Kernel plan proceeds

Sun continues to work on the Java Kernel, the idea of which is to provide a subset of the Java Runtime Environment tuned to particular programs.

Formerly known as Java Browser Edition, the Java Kernel is planned for release as part of Java Standard Edition (SE) 6 update 4, probably in early-2008, a Sun representative said on Friday. Developers will have early access to the code to provide feedback.

An original intent was to make Java like a Flash plug-in and enable a resurgence of Java on the browser. Applications would specify which features they need, such as Swing and XML parsing, said Sun staff engineer Ethan Nicholas, who is working on the project.

"The basic idea was that the current Java Runtime Environment is simply too big, and most programs require only a small subset of the functionality," Nicholas wrote in September 2006 on his blog. "The 'browser edition' that I suggested would enable you to install exactly the subset of Java that your particular program required, but you would be able to download all of the other functionality on demand (and thus be fully compatible with J2SE)."

Some Sun employees doubted the project would fly, according to Nicholas. Even a detailed analysis of the idea painted a bleak picture, he said.

"The feature did in fact get submitted as a proposal for Java 7 under the name "Java Kernel" (the idea being that you download a small "kernel" of Java functionality, which is in turn capable of downloading the rest of it)," Nicholas said.

Nicholas said he developed a stripped-down JRE installed containing only enough functionality to run "System.out.println," or "Hello World."

To determine which files were necessary for the project, Nicholas wrote a program to iterate through the JRE files.

"After going through all of the files in this fashion, I was left with an extremely minimal JRE that could run Hello World and ... well, that's about it. But it at least provided a starting point. Building a working installer from this JRE was itself a challenge because several of the files that weren't necessary to run Hello World were still necessary to successfully install the JRE, but I persevered and now have a fully functioning, minimal JRE," Nicholas said.

Comments about the project posted on Nicholas's blog varied.

"I also believe modularization of the JRE is the solution. Not just for the size of the download, but also for different other issues," one commenter said in 2006.

"The problem here is that Java isn't just a browser based technology, it's a platform. When I write a Java applet or application, I expect the platform to be there," said another respondent.