Editor’s note: More and more mobile app developers are deciding to make apps for Android, even though it still doesn’t have the same reach as the iPhone. In this guest post Kevin Nakao, the VP of Mobile for Whitepages, makes the argument for taking the Android plunge now (as he is preparing to with a new Whitepages Android app launching next week). Follow him on Twitter @knakao

Mobile games publisher Gameloft might have thrown in the towel on Android, but that is a mistake. I certainly understand why they gave up on Android. Since launching in February of this year, our own Whitepages Caller ID app has become a top ten grossing Android application, and yet we’ve seen less than $54,000 in revenue. While our iPhone app download counts are in the millions, our Android app downloads are a mere 17 percent of this volume.

Despite our meager return on investment this year, I believe that the real potential for Android app developers lies in the New Year. Here’s why:

Google Voice was GrandCentral before Google acquired that company back in 2007. Like most Google acquisitions it took a long time to fully rebuild the service on Google’s infrastructure, and even today Google Voice is still in private beta.

But lots of changes are coming. Google Voice should roll out publicly shortly. Users may be able to port their existing phone numbers to Google if they choose. Google’s acquisition of Gizmo5 will give the service a client soft phone plus enhanced VoIP capabilities. And who knows what part Google Voice will play in in the upcoming Google Phone.

So a little housekeeping is in order. And the first item on the checklist is to shut down the GrandCentral website on December 31, 2009. Users were upgraded to Google Voice earlier this year, but old GrandCentral messages are still on the old site. So if you want to keep them, Google suggests you download them soon.

The email:

Do a search for Google Wave on the App Store from your iPhone or desktop client, and you’ll see an application called just that pop up, ready to be installed as soon as you fork over $0.99 (or €0.79 in my case). One caveat: it’s not built, authorized or in any way endorsed by Google.

Spotted by Stuart Dredge over at Mobile Entertainment, the unofficial Google Wave iPhone app seemingly slipped past Apple’s usually and notoriously rigorous quality assurance and trademark compliance team and made its way to the App Store (iTunes link – up to you to decide if this is something you want to pay for).

Today at the RealTime CrunchUp, representatives from some of the top companies involved in location based services came together to talk about the current state and future of geo-based services.

Participating in the panel were:
Matt Galligan, co-Founder of SimpleGeo
Ryan Sarver, Director of Platform at Twitter
Tristan Walker, VP of Business Development at Foursquare
Steve Lee, Group Product Manager Google Maps for Mobile and Google Latitude
Justin Shaffer, Founder of Hot Potato
Elad Gil, CEO of Mixer Labs
Moderators were our own Erick Schonfeld and MG Siegler.

I’m a big fan of keeping things simple, but that doesn’t mean things have to be bland. Google search results are pretty bland. Sure, sometimes you get returned things like YouTube thumbnails or pictures, but many results are still just a monotonous stream of blue links. Google tried to break this stream up a bit with its Search Options, an expandable feature, that gives you a left-side toolbar. But even that is just a bland series of links. Google is finally thinking about changing that.

Today, Google has begun testing a new look for Search Options. This offers more visual approach to this sidebar, including colors and graphics (oh my). As you can see in the screenshot, “Everything” (regular Google results), “News,” and “Blogs” are a few of the newly visual tabs. There is also a “More” area that shows other things like “Maps.”

The public debut of Google Chrome OS today has the press abuzz over the potential of the new web-based operating system. And now that it’s open sourced, you have the chance to try it out for yourself. Unfortunately, most people aren’t ready to undertake the daunting task of actually taking Google’s recently open-sourced code and turning that into a bootable computer. So we’ve put together a step-by-step guide to doing this, for free, in around 15 minutes (depending on how long it takes to download the OS itself). No, this won’t get your computer booting Chrome OS natively (and frankly, you probably wouldn’t want to yet anyway). But it will get it up and running in a virtual machine using the free software VirtualBox, which is available for Macs, PCs, and Linux.

First, a few caveats: we didn’t create the Chrome OS build ourselves — it was downloaded from BitTorrent. In theory it could possibly have been tweaked by some malicious hacker to steal your Google account information (this is unlikely, but who knows). There’s an easy fix if you’re worried though: just go make a throwaway Gmail account, and use that to play around with the OS. Also note that because this is running in a virtual machine, you’re probably not going to be seeing great performance (like that 7 second boot time). But it’s more than good enough to get a feel for the OS for yourself.

Ever since Google started talking about its Google Chrome OS, developers, competitors, and observers have been wondering why Google needs two operating systems: Android and Chrome OS. At today’s chrome OS briefing, Google was asked whether Chrome OS would support Android apps. The answer is no.

Of course, as Michael pointed out during the Q&A, Steve Jobs said the same thing when he launched the iPhone without apps, and then when he was ready, it was all about the apps. But Google had a good response: they want to make web apps work well on Chrome OS and therefore will only be focusing on those. Later on Sergey Brin touched on the same theme when he said, “Call us dumb businessmen, but . . . we believe the Web platform is a much simpler way.”

Here’s the initial exchange from MG’s live notes:

Still not sure why Google is building its own operating system? It created this animated video to try to explain why the Web needs a new OS, and why that OS should be Chrome. Google just showed the video at its Chrome OS press event which MG is liveblogging.

We’re here today in Mountain View, CA at the Googleplex for an event during which Google is promising to give a lot of details about Chrome OS. This includes a full product rundown and details about the formal launch, which is expected to occur early next year.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s VP of Product Management and Matthew Papakipos, Google’s Engineering Director for Google Chrome OS are speaking at the event. And there will be a Q&A session afterwards.

In a couple of hours, Google is going to share more details about its upcoming operating system Chrome OS at an event in Mountain View that will most likely be covered from start to finish by TechCrunch writers (and then some) as well as a slew of other media outlets. Jolicloud, that other OS for netbooks that is completely built for people who live and work on the Web from the ground up, has in the meantime been running fine on my own netbook for the past couple of months.

So in light of the upcoming GOOG buzz, Jolicloud founder Tariq Krim got in touch with me to share some of the things he and his team have been working on. Since the subject lies rather close to the premise of John Gruber’s great The OS Opportunity blog post, it’s worth reading that before continuation.

As the TechCrunch Network’s resident mobile guy, I was given the task of writing up a list of apps for each smartphone platform that you ought to buy as little e-stocking stuffers for your loved ones. It was to be my primary contribution to CrunchGear’s ultra-amazing Holiday Gift Guide; my festively themed magnum opus.

But there’s a problem with this idea: it can’t be done. It’s not because I’m lazy (which may be true), nor because I don’t have any apps to recommend (which most certainly is not). I can’t recommend apps for you to buy for others, because you can’t buy apps for others.

Google is powerful. We all know this, and live with it. But that brings up some interesting concerns when they break into new businesses — will they use that power to give them an unfair advantage? With great power comes great responsibility, and all that. Today brings a totally innocuous example, but it’s still interesting.

A new feature in Gmail Labs allows you to change your contacts’ circular chat status icons in Android logo status icons. But the key is that these icons only change for users who are currently online on their Android phones.

Yesterday we wrote about the soon to launch Google Phone, a Google branded Android phone that we believe will hit the market in early 2010.

Lots of people are saying there’s no way Google will enter the phone market directly and compete with all these handset manufacturers who have bet on Android. Daring Fireball, PC World and IntoMobile are among the doubters. And a lot of people are pointing to a Tom Krazit/CNET article last month that quoted Google’s Andy Rubin: “We’re not making hardware…We’re enabling other people to build hardware,” and “Rubin, vice president of engineering for Android at Google, scoffed at the notion that the company would “compete with its customers” by releasing its own phone.”

Normally I’d just point to the fact that many companies deny the existence of products until the day they announce them. Apple scoffed at the notion that they’d ever build a phone until they announced the iPhone, for example. The last thing Google wants is a lot of confusion among handset manufacturers just when those manufacturers are putting the finishing touches on their own Android phones.

But there may be another way Google will argue that they aren’t “competing with customers” by launching their own device – technically, it may not be a phone.

The Google Phone may be a data only, VoIP driven device. And Google may be lining up at least AT&T to provide those data services for the Google Phone, says one person we spoke with today.

Funny observation made by The Times-Tribune newspaper editor and Internet content director Jeff Sonderman, especially given the seemingly never-ending quarrels between newspaper publishers and the search giant.

At least two of the search suggestions still indicate newspapers are important and ‘not dying’.

(Via TwitPic and a hat tip to @Wallie – you were right)

Imagine a world where you sit at your computer and you never go outside. Where you never see another human being. This is the world that sites like Google and Facebook want you to live in.

Though they’d never admit to such a thing, the reasoning should be obvious: The longer you’re at your computer, the more time you’re spending on their sites. The more time your spending on their sites, the more ads you’re being served. The more ads being served, the more money they are earning. No matter why these sites originally started, or what features they add, that is, quite literally, the bottom line. They’d have us strapped to a chair with our eyes taped open like Alex in A Clockwork Orange, if they could. The only difference is that we’d have a contraption on our arms to allow us to click on the ads being shown every so often.

Thankfully, we don’t quite live in that world yet. And there are a couple factors pushing us the opposite way from that. Mobile devices are the biggest one. But even that is still just a screen. You may not be chained to a desk using it, but as plenty of people with an iPhone will tell you, you may end staring at this screen even more than you do a desktop or laptop monitor throughout a day. But there’s another up and coming factor working against our screen slavery: Location.

Google is planning to hold a special Chrome OS event at its headquarters in Mountain View, CA this Thursday morning, we’ve just been notified. The plan is to give some technical background information as well as show off some demos, we’re told. More notably, they will be giving a “complete overview” of the new OS, which they say will launch next year.

Sundar Pichai, Google’s VP of Product Management and Matthew Papakipos, Google Engineering Director for Google Chrome OS will be speaking at the event. And there will be a Q&A session afterwards.

There was lots of news late last week about a proposed modification to the Google Books settlement agreement. Today there was going to be more news – a televised debate about Google Books on Jim Lehrer’s NewsHour. But, alas, Google backed out.

The details are of the fight are subtle, but all the hubub centers around what’s broadly called orphan works – where it’s hard to figure out the author/rights holder of a given work. Depending on how broadly you define orphan works, they make up between 2 million and 8 million of the 15 million or so books that have been published in the U.S. And while this is the apparent battleground, the real fight is over the whole Google Books scheme.

Google says they’re saving humanity, or something close. Which is probably a stretch. Their opponents, fueled by donations from Google competitors (among others), says Google wants to “establish a monopoly over digital content access and distribution; usurp Congress’s role in setting copyright policy; lock writers into their unsought registry, stripping them of their individual contract rights; put library budgets and patron privacy at risk; and establish a dangerous precedent by abusing the class action process.”

As usual, Paul Carr sorts it all out for us. And while the details of a legal settlement on how the rights around digitized copies of old printed books aren’t exactly riveting, the players involved sure do make it a lot of fun to watch.

…Because the Open Book Alliance isn’t led by just anyone. No, one of the guys in charge over there is Gary Reback (pictured above). The man who many credit with taking down Microsoft. I interviewed Reback a few months ago, and Google Books was one of the topics we discussed.

As we noted last night, Google looks to be on the verge of unleashing Chrome extension support in a major way. Not only does the home tab page on the new builds of Chromium (and the dev builds of Chrome) feature not-yet-turned-on links to what looks to be an extensions gallery, but there are plenty of references (and pictures) in the Chromium boards as to what Google is planning with extension support. And actually, Google’s own sample extensions have already started working with builds of Chromium.

As you can see in the screenshot, both the Google Mail Checker and (Chromium) BuildBot Monitor are up and running in a new build of Chromium. In fact, they’re even working on the latest builds of the dev version of Chrome for Mac, which just got updated tonight as well (they weren’t working with the previous build). The one other sample extension, “Subscribe in Feed Reader” doesn’t appear to be working yet on Macs, but images posted earlier by Google Operating System indicate that this is working on Chromium builds for Windows. To find all of these sample extensions, go here.

Remember all that talk about Bing starting to fizzle in September? Well it didn’t happen, and now October numbers and Bing gained another half a point to reach 9.9 percent market share of U.S. searches, according to comScore’s qSearch service. Five months after launch, Bing has steadily gained two points of market share.

And it is keeping the pressure on, with deals to index realtime data streams from both Twitter and Facebook (Google also has a deal with Twitter, but not Facebook), a deal with Wolfram Alpha for nutrition and diet data, and the constant rollout of new features such as better video search.

For some time now, Google Chrome has been working with a number of extensions — but unofficially. That’s about to change in a big way, maybe as soon as tomorrow. And some digging through backchannel chatter reveals some of Google’s intentions here.

As first spotted by DownloadSquad earlier today, Google appears to have tipped its hand a little early. In the newest builds of Chromium across all the platforms (yes, even Mac and Linux), you can clearly see the jigsaw puzzle area in the lower right hand corner. This is in the same place that the colorful stripes usually appear to take you to the Theme Gallery. But clicking on this area currently redirects you back to google.com — but as you can see when you hover over it, clearly there will be something at https://chrome.google.com/extensions, presumably an Extensions Gallery.