On Chrome Web Store, Real Games Mix With Mario Knockoffs

We've heard it over and over again (and arguably for good reason): Nintendo does not make games for platforms it does not control. So, imagine my surprise yesterday when I stumbled across a dozen or so Mario games on Google's Chrome Web Store.

These games are no more real than that Rolex you bought for $15 in Times Square - they're unlicensed, generally low-quality knockoffs, taking advantage of the openness of Google's browser, which just turned five. Many of the store's new native desktop apps look like snazzy cousins of the apps you might find in the Google Play Store on Android; however, in Chrome's Web app store (I know, these product names are all confusing), it's still the Wild West.

In addition to the fake Marios, a cursory search of the Web app store yesterday turned up knockoffs of many other popular franchises: one for Fruit Ninja, two for Crash Bandicoot, four for Doodle Jump, nine for Candy Crush Saga and 10 for Sonic the Hedgehog. A source with knowledge of the store said Google investigates unauthorized apps if the content owners report the offending apps to the company.

These fakes mix with real apps, like Rovio's official Angry Birds Chrome Web app, and to separate the good from the bad, users have to check the developer's website name. For example, one of the Candy Crush Saga knockoffs lists as its website candycrushsaga.blogspot.com, which is not one of King's sites. The official site for that game is candycrushsaga.com.

I asked a Nintendo spokesperson if the company was aware of the Mario knockoffs, and she returned the following generic statement from Nintendo of America:

Nintendo video games are offered only on Nintendo systems such as the Wii U and Nintendo 3DS. Applications on the Apple or Google marketplaces that purport to be Nintendo video games are not legitimate and users who download these applications may expose themselves to spyware or other malicious software [...]

Wait, malicious software? Yes, it's possible, as 80,000 users learned last year by way of a fake Bad Piggies Chrome app. According to security company Barracuda Networks, that's the number of users who installed a bogus Bad Piggies and got some "aggressive adware" to boot. Bonus!

The Nintendo statement continued, "Nintendo actively monitors the unauthorized use of its intellectual property, and will continue to seek removal of any unauthorized content in these marketplaces."

Taking these specific games out of the Chrome store won't completely neutralize potential security threats posed by current or future games, of course. But the very thing that makes the store work - a search, discovery and recommendation-focused design that makes these games and services more accessible to Chrome users - may mislead gamers who don't think to look too closely.

"We remove apps from the Chrome Web Store that do not comply with our terms of service," a Google spokesperson said. Some of the Mario games I mentioned in my emails to the company have now disappeared from the Chrome store, but here is a screenshot of how they were showing up for me in the store's main trending section yesterday.

The Latest From Chrome and Android at Google Launch Event

Google will show off the latest in its Chrome and Android lines this morning.

It's no secret that there should be a new Nexus 7 - in fact, Best Buy already has the tablet on sale in 16 gigabyte and 32GB configurations.

Android itself is due for a modest update, as well, going to version 4.3 with improvements in Bluetooth and tweaks other areas.

We're also expecting something called "Chromecast" from Chrome, which will offer another way to get content from a mobile device on to a TV.

Earlier:
9:06 am: Sundar Pichai, SVP of Android, Chrome and Apps, takes the stage.

"At Google I/O, we talked about the fact that we are living at a pivotal moment in computing," he says. "Laptops, tablets, phones, televisions - it's a multiscreen world.

"Our goal is to deliver an experience that is seamless."

Pichai says, "Between Android and Chrome, we have a solution for all the computing devices that users have in their lives."

Two things coming today: A new Android device, a new Chrome device.

By the end of 2013, consumers are going to buy more tablets per year than personal computers. How is Android doing? More than 70 million activated so far.

Almost one in two tablets sold worldwide is based on Android.

A year ago, 20 billion applications downloaded on Google Play. Today, 50 billion. And, revenue per user is up 2.5x in a year. In that year, Google Play has gone from half a billion apps to 1 billion apps.

Pichai: We've worked closely with Asus - the CEO, Jonney Shih is here. The Nexus 7 accounts for more than 10 percent of tablets sold. In Japan, it was the single highest-selling tablet in the holiday season, accounting for 45 percent of sales.

Android exec Hugo Barra hops on stage. We can see he has a tablet in his back pocket.

It's tiny and thin. Barra: It's 2 millimeters thinner, with the same display size but reduced side bezels of 3 mm on either side. And it's 50 grams lighter. "It's a much more comfortable grip, and of course, it fits easily into your purse or jacket." It has the same soft touch with added gloss.

It has higher resolution - from 216 pixels per inch to 323 per inch - the highest of any in the market.

It can show a 30 percent wider range of colors, and has stereo speakers, with Fraunhofer virtual surround sound.

Even more specs: 1.2 MP front camera, 5 MP rear camera. 1.5 GHz Snapdragon S4 Pro, 1.8x CPU, 4x GPU, doubled system memory to 2 GB. Dual band Wi-Fi, BLuetooth 4.0, 4G LTE for any U.S. network. HDMI, NFC, wireless charging. Some extra power compared to the original - 9 hours of HD video and 10 hours of Web browsing.

And it's shipping with Android 4.3, the new version of Jelly Bean.

It has multi-user support with restricted profiles that give control over content and apps at a user level (for example, for parents).

Now Barra is showing off a jigsaw puzzle app on his tablet ... scintillating demo material.

The app hides all the purchasing functionality and only exposes content to the restricted profile that has been approved.

And supporting OpenLG ES 3.0 to support graphics in games.

Here's Ina Fried's dedicated post on the Nexus 7.

Barra says they're going to show car racing with "jaw-dropping visuals." These demos are always a little strange because we're watching them projected on a huge screen, not the tiny tablet.

As a lady shoots people while riding a motorcycle amid lens flares, Barra says it's all rendered in real-time in native 1080p resolution.

Plus, there are new DRM APIs to restrict content access, which Barra says he's "thrilled" about. Really? Oh no, he's actually "thrilled" that Netflix has designed for it. Their new app supporting Android 4.3 is already available.

So when is Android 4.3 coming? They're pushing an update over the air today.

Barra switches over to talk about native Google Apps to show how they look on a tablet. They've redesigned Google Docs, with support for offline spreadsheet editing, etc. Chrome now has "print-quality" text and 15 percent more screen space. It also includes automatic translation.

The new Google Maps includes an "Explore" feature. Barra is gushing about how the layout is "awesome" especially at such a high resolution. And lastly, Google Hangouts - it also includes screensharing so people who are video-chatting can watch each other edit docs on their tablets.

Google Play product manager Ellie Powers shows how tablet apps are featured, and says hundreds of games have added the Google Play game services shown off at Google I/O. She demos some games and leaderboards. For instance, a game that looks like Mario Kart on jet skis now features responsive splashes on the windshield, and a game with a guy jumping across rooftops, parkour-style, has the shadows on the buildings change as you shift perspective.

Google Play will have a textbook section starting in early August, she says, with books from all five major textbook publishers. It'll include purchases as well as rentals for up to an 80 percent discount.

The prices are $229 for 16GB, $269 for 32GB and $349 for unlocked LTE. The first two will be on sale on July 30 at Best Buy, GameStop, Walmart, etc. The 4G model will be available "in the coming weeks," as will international launches in countries like the U.K. and Germany.

After a kind of odd Nexus 7 commercial about a kid with braces giving a speech in front of his class and then Googling "how do I ask a girl out," Pichai is back. He's talking TV. He says every single month more than 200 billion videos are watched in the world. And Netflix and YouTube combined have 49.4 percent share of all peak downstream Internet traffic in America. And lots of that is happening on non-TV devices.

A product dude whose name I didn't catch says Google's goals for TV are: "Make it fast and easy to set up, with nothing new to learn, and it works across platforms and devices."

He holds up what looks like a little USB stick, and says it's called Chromecast. It's running a simplified version of Chrome OS. It plugs into the HDMI port on a TV.

Let's say you want to watch YouTube on your TV, he says - you'll go to that site on your phone/table/PC and see a "Cast" button on the screen. When you do that, it's pulled from the cloud and played directly on the TV. Your device doesn't push the content, it comes direct from YouTube.

For the demo, Rishi Chandra comes onstage. In the past, he's the guy who demoed Google TV.

Interestingly, this TV effort is built around Chrome OS, where the previous Google TV was built on Android.

Here's Ina's pullout story on Chromecast.

Oops, and I missed her Android story. She's a busy lady.

"If you know how to use YouTube on your phone, you know how to use YouTube on your TV," Chandra says.

He adds, "Even in sleep mode, the videos continue to play. We don't drain your battery."

But, he says, "we recognize that not everyone has an Android phone. And we need a solution that works for everyone. Let's pretend my wife has an iPhone (heh)." It works the same.

The Cast button can also be used to bring a video back to the phone - if you click it, you can switch to your phone screen and the video will keep playing from the place you left it.

This also works for Netflix. This is the third Netflix callout of the presentation - unusually strong support for a single partner.

Chandra plays the "House of Cards" credits, which are in my opinion possibly awesomer than the show. This demo is to show that you can direct the content from any device that's connected to the Chromecast on the TV.

In this game of dueling remote controls, you can control content between an iPhone, a Nexus 7 and a TV. It's not exactly clear to me how this is coordinated - perhaps it's just the fact that they're on the same Netflix account.

This can also be used for Google Play Music and Pandora, Chandra says. The "Cast" button - which is a little rectangle with arcs in the corner - shows up there, too.

And lastly, a beta feature: You can project any Chrome tab from the browser to the TV.

"We'll project what's on your local device right onto the television - not the entire desktop or the URL bar, but what you want to look at." Chandra keeps emphasizing that the TV is the best screen in the house with the best speakers in the house, so it's ideal for content.

This will work with most Windows and Mac laptops as well as Chromebooks.

Developers won't need to build a new app to work with the Google Cast SDK, which is out in developer preview today.

Actually, the Pandora integration is still under development.

It will retail for $35 and can be ordered today from Amazon, Best Buy and Google Play.

And it will include three months free of Netflix (another Netflix plug/tie-up!) if you buy now.

That concludes the presentation. Bye for now!

Google's Sundar Pichai: One in Two Tablets Is Running Android

Though the iPad seems to get all the attention, Google's Sundar Pichai said that Android is now running on half of the tablets being sold, with more than 70 million Android tablets having been activated.

"Google has made tremendous strides," Pichai said, speaking today at an Android and Chrome event in San Francisco.

To keep things growing, Google on Wednesday is launching an updated version of the Nexus 7 tablet built for Google by Asus. The new black design is thinner, lighter and has a smaller bezel than the first Nexus 7.

It adds a higher-density 1080p display, which packs 323 pixels per inch.

A 16 gigabyte Wi-Fi model will be available for $229, while the 32GB model will sell for $269.

Google is also announcing an unlocked LTE version of the tablet that works with Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile. That version will sell for $349 and be available in the coming weeks.

The original Nexus 7, Pichai said, accounted for 10 percent of all Android tablets.

Google is also hoping to get more students interested in the Nexus and other Android tablets with a new textbook store. The section of Google Play, which will debut in early August, features the ability to rent or buy textbooks, and will have content from all five major educational publishers.

Google's Chromecast Lets You Watch TV on the Web on Your TV. Guess Who Doesn't Like That?

One of the cool features of Google's new Chromecast device: It lets users move whatever they can see on their computer's Chrome Web browser onto their TVs.

One group of people who might not think that's cool: TV executives, who are still trying to draw a distinction between things you watch on your computer and things you watch on your TV.

For example: Chromecast's mirroring capability poses an issue for Hulu. The video website has tried to restrict user's ability to watch its free Hulu.com service on TV screens; instead, it sells the ability to watch Hulu on a TV as part of its $8 a month Hulu Plus service.

Hulu says it is working with Google to bring a Hulu Plus app to Chromecast, and when it does it will be an "optimized" viewing experience.* And not all of Hulu Plus's content is available on free Hulu. But a lot is. So in theory, that should make Hulu Plus a harder sell for Chromecast customers.

Google may also hear from HBO, which is fine with people watching its HBO Go service on big screens - but only with the explicit approval of the pay TV channel. For instance, HBO prevented Apple TV users from streaming its programs from its iPads and iPhones until February; last month, Apple added a dedicated HBO Go app to Apple TV.

Of course, anyone with any common sense, who doesn't work in legal or biz dev at a large entertainment company, knows that it's silly to argue that something that's on one screen shouldn't be on another. And anyone who wants to buy a cable and connect their laptop to their TV could already do this.

Which is exactly what Ossama Alami, a manager in Google's developer relations group, told my colleague Liz Gannes when she asked him about the issue today.

There is one solution for content owners who don't want people using Chromecast to fling stuff to their sets, Alami noted: Stop distributing their stuff on the Chrome browser. Not that he's suggesting they should do that.

It's worth noting that this move comes as Google is floating the notion of an "over the top" pay-TV solution, and talking to content owners and networks about licensing their stuff. And it comes after Google has already irked some content owners with earlier versions of Google TV, supposedly because Google didn't work hard enough to keep pirated content off of those devices.

You'd think that if Google were serious about its latest TV push, it would take extra care not to ruffle the TV guys' feathers. So maybe it doesn't think this is a ruffle-worthy issue. Or maybe it just doesn't care.

--

Only tangentially related: Google's first ad for Chromecast is pitch-perfect. Shows you what the product does and different use cases for it, in realistic settings (check the clutter in some of these TV rooms - these look the kind of places real people live, and watch TV, in).

And it portrays TV-watching as a great thing to do with people you like. These people are "constantly directing their attention away from one another," but what they're mostly doing is having fun, with other people.

Smart.

*Google is also describing the current version of Chromecast as a "beta" version. Of course, "beta" can be a long-standing condition at Google.

Sundar Pichai on the Difference Between Chromecast and Google TV (Interview)

Sundar Pichai

Google has two operating systems: Chrome and Android. And now it has two living-room devices: Chromecast and Google TV.

There's a good reason for that, argued Sundar Pichai, Google's SVP of Android, Chrome and Apps, in an interview after the event.

In fact, Pichai took over control of the Google TV project in March of this year. It had previously been the domain of YouTube head Salar Kamangar, but it was internally seen as better aligned with Android and Android partner relationships, sources said.

(Pichai, who has a reputation for being good at managing partnerships, gained a bunch of power at Google at that time, adding all of Andy Rubin's Android on top of his previous domain of Chrome and Apps.)

So why two different devices? The new Chromecast dongle will be a sort of lightweight way to stream video on a television. Google TV, you probably already know about - though you probably don't own as it's not super popular. Soon, "it will be a full-fledged Android for television," Pichai said, noting that he expects to announce many more partners at CES early next year.

The Chromecast costs $35 and has just 256k 512 megabytes of memory. But that doesn't mean it streams low-quality video; the default resolution is the industry-standard 1080p.

The new Google Chromecast

Where Google TV can provide "an immersive experience" that's appropriate for gaming, Chromecast will have too much latency for gaming, Pichai explained.

So why make a new device that doesn't do as much? To try to popularize the activity of watching Internet TV on a real living-room TV, said Pichai.

"It is shocking how much video is consumed on phones, tablets and laptops, but the TV usage just breaks off," he said. (During prepared remarks, Pichai cited Sandvine data showing that YouTube and Netflix account for an estimated 49.4 percent share of all peak downstream Internet traffic in the U.S.)

"Whereas TV is the most-used device at home, by far. People watch 4.5 hours of television per household in the U.S. So there is this gap, and you have to figure out a way to converge it." But simplicity is key, he said. "We should never set up expensive boxes and call someone to say how do I connect all this?"

Google's "Cast" protocol, which adds streaming options to apps while they are running on devices using the same Wi-Fi network as a Chromecast dongle, allows for playing video with no installation needed.

A Vizio Co-Star, one of the devices integrated with Google TV

"Effectively, the Chromecast is a Web media player," Pichai said. "Once you say, 'Play this YouTube video or Netflix video,' it is actually pinging YouTube or Netflix over Wi-Fi, going through the Internet backbone, and they are just sending it like they would send it to a browser."

Internally, Pichai said, his team calls this process "flinging" content. Flinging is intended for video and music apps, and outside developers are welcome to build in support for it.

Chromecast will also support a second behavior: "Mirroring" Web pages, though that will be in beta for the next few months. With mirroring, whatever you do on your phone, tablet or computer is synced up with the display on your TV. That way you can pull content from any website, not just supported apps - though you'll draw down the battery on the device that's being mirrored. My colleague Peter Kafka suspects that some TV companies will not be pleased.

These features aren't limited to the Chromecast device, Pichai said. Google TV will also support Google Cast, Pichai said today.

Google's two-pronged approach actually parallels competitors like Roku, which offers both boxes and streaming sticks for certain TVs. However, where Google might have an advantage on the works-like-a-browser front, Roku is ahead on the content deals. In addition to Netflix and YouTube, it has Amazon, Hulu, HBO Go and other channels. Chromecast doesn't yet.

"I fully expect more partners to join us, because it makes a lot of sense for their content to be seen on the television," Pichai said.

Correction, July 29: This article incorrectly reported the amount of memory that the Chromecast has; the correct number is 512MB.

Google's Chromecast Offers Another Way to Get Content From Mobile to TV

Google on Wednesday announced plans for Chromecast, which the company says is an easier way to get video and other content from a mobile device to a television.

The approach is centered around a two-inch fob that will sell for $35; it plugs into any TV's HDMI port and connects to a home Wi-Fi network. Interestingly, Google opted to use a modified version of Chrome OS for this effort, while Google TV was Android-based.

Google's Sundar Pichai said that nearly half of peak Internet traffic is coming from YouTube and Netflix, but most of that is going to PCs, tablets and phones.

"The television is missing from the picture," Pichai said, despite the fact it is the best and most immersive display. In any given week, he said, only 15 percent of U.S. households stream video to their TV.

Chromecast works not only from Android devices, but also from supported apps on iOS devices, including YouTube and Netflix. It also works with Macs and PCs, as well as the Chrome OS-based Chromebook Pixel.

While the streams are launched from the mobile device, they are streamed from the cloud, avoiding battery drain and allowing users to multitask on their mobile device.

Other apps, including Pandora, are coming soon. Meanwhile, Google is releasing an early version of the software tools that programmers will need to add Chromecast support to their mobile apps and websites.

The announcement came as part of a broader event that also saw updates to Android and a new version of the Nexus 7 tablet.

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