Mountain View, California — Google in not just targeting the iPhone. It has set its sights on Apple’s dominance of online music, and one of the most fascinating bits of news to appear out of Google I/O conference was the company’s stealth acquisition of Simplify Media a couple months ago.
Last month, SimplifyMedia withdrew of the iPhone App space informing its customers that it was moving in a new direction. A cryptic blog post then was the last we saw of SimplifyMedia…until today it showed that direction was toward Mountain View.
Google disclosed the new initiatives at its Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco Thursday.
At the Google IO developer conference, Vic Gundotra, VP of engineering, announced that Google had acquired Simplify Media, a start-up that makes software to stream music between different devices and from the Web.
Google intends to begin selling music through a future Web-based version of the Android Market and to empower Android users to stream music on their computers to their Android phones.
Simplify Media’s software examins all of the non-DRM’d music in your iTunes/Jukebox software library and allows you to then stream that music from its servers in the cloud to any of your Android devices, presumably even GoogleTV.
The software was presented only briefly today, and it is not certain if the service will enable offline listening nor how it will ascertain ownership of music. But Google says it simply wants to make syncing music easier. In a keynote demo, Google showed off the ability to purchase a song (or an app) online using a personal computer, and have it automatically added to an Android device. Currently, users have to buy apps using their phone, and transferring music requires physically connecting an Android device to the phone, just as is required with Apple’s popular iPhone.
Gundotra did not stated when this capability would come to the Android operating system. But the announcement indicates a vulnerability in Apple’s elegant, carefully controlled universe: Apple has no apparent cloud strategy.
Apple recently acquired a company called LaLa that enables you to stream your own music from its central servers, once it has classified the songs on your computer and mirrored them in the cloud. Apple is widely expected to integrate some portion of that service into iTunes, its software for syncing and buying media with mobile devices and traditional computers.
In a concluding press conference, Gundotra called the music store a demo of technology it is building and said the company had not yet signed any deals with major labels to create a comprehensive online music store.
It is not evident if Google, which prides itself on its openness, plans to allow other online digital music purveyors, such as Amazon or eMusic, to also offer one-click syncing with Android devices.
But the Simplify acquisition may be only the beginning. Gundotra also demonstrated a new version of the online Android sales outlet, with a Music link to download songs. It was just a demo–no deals with content owners have been signed yet–but the message was clear: iTunes, watch your back.