At its Mountain View headquarters, Google is constructing a $120 million secret project, which hints at its expanding interest in consumer devices, like its competitors, Microsoft and Apple. According to reports in the
San Jose Mercury News, a lab will be set up to test a number of consumer products - Google has unveiled that one of them, under the brand name '@home', will have the ability to wirelessly stream music or data to other household devices (See Also:
Google working on an 'entertainment device'). Sounds very similar to Apple's Airplay which lets you stream music and video wirelessly to your iDevices and a Bose's wireless home theater system that performs the same function. This could really push things in Google's favor as wireless streaming is proving to become the entertainment medium of the future. They're also modifying an existing lab for a project mysteriously titled 'Project X' which seems to involve precision optical technology.
The icing on the cake, however, is what Google calls the 'Google Experience Center' - a 120,000 square-foot facility, deemed to be a private museum for Google's most important clients and advertising partners. To the great disappointment of Google fans, this will mostly be a confidential space and not typically open to public. With this museum, Google's joining a big club which includes companies like Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Boeing and IBM that showcase their products and technology to potential buyers, analysts and other important partners.
With the U.S and the E.U granting approval of the $12.5 billion Motorola Mobility acquisition, it is becoming more and more clear that the company is aiming for a future where hardware plays a more vital role in its product offerings. With HTC designing the Nexus one, Samsung constructing the Nexus S and the Galaxy Nexus, its easy to say that after the acquisition, the company that designed the Honeycomb flagship tablet, the XOOM, may just design the next Nexus.
By allowing the testing facilities to be a part of the sales process, the Experience Center will help Google demonstrate the reliability of new products. Google's also reportedly on the verge of launching a cloud service called 'Google Drive'. Like Dropbox, the service is expected to tap the 'cloud storage' market where users can access their content on the go with their smartphones, tablets or even third party computers with the help of a simple app and an Internet connection.
With the ability to stream media using Airplay and wirelessly sync all your Apple devices, Apple has already begun to create an ecosystem of its products. With the Apple TV underway, it's looking to expand this ecosystem. So how will Google's ecosystem be? Well for starters the ability to sync all your data on a Google device is as simple as inputting your gmail ID. Google has services such as Google Docs, Google Music, Gmail, seamlessly integrated into smartphones, tablets and the fair few owners of the Cromebook. We are hoping to see some integration with the Android powered Television that was shown off at CES 2012.
With the recent success of the Galaxy Nexus, the Android ICS OS, the announcement of an @home service and a lab being set up to test a number of consumer products, it certainly seems to be an exciting time for Google!