19 companies create innovative products with Google technologies

(Cross-posted on the Official Google Code blog)

Every year at Google I/O, companies arrive excited to demo their coolest new products in the Developer Sandbox. In the past, these demos were only accessible to I/O attendees. This year, we wanted to help spread the love and knowledge from these innovative companies to developers who were unable to attend the conference and to attendees who want to relive the excitement or check out companies they missed.

In addition to the "Who’s at Google I/O" guest posts you may have seen from some of our developers on this blog, we’ve created video case studies from 19 of the companies that demoed their products in this year’s I/O Sandbox. These videos highlight innovations that span the entire range of Google product areas, including Google TV.





Watch the full playlist of videos here. As always, you can visit Google Code to learn about Google technologies you can use to build your own amazing new product.

Becky Chappell, Developer Marketing TeamPosted by Scott Knaster, Editor

MOVL Apps for Google TV - Connected devices and shared experiences

Guest post by MOVL

If your household is anything like ours, you probably notice everyone tapping away on their phones with their attention bouncing back and forth between the TV and the phone or tablet. So we thought, wouldn’t it be great if we could create an experience that takes advantage of the fact that everyone uses their mobile device while crowded around the TV, and create something that brings people together into a shared social experience.

We come from a long background of developing web based apps that focus on real-time social experiences, and we’ve been watching the connected TV space anxiously waiting for a way to bring our ideas to the living room. When GoogleTV unleashed the web experience right on our TV, they did it in a way that blurs the lines in how we consume TV and web based content. That’s when we decided to jump in and start developing apps specifically for TV.

Our first app WeDraw.tv, is a drawing/guessing game where the TV acts as the game board and players use their Android and iOS devices as game controllers to draw pictures and guess secret words. You can find it in the GoogleTV Spotlight and it’s most fun when you get several people playing together in real time.

WeDraw is a big success and proved that people really like this shared experience around the TV. From a developer’s perspective, we were able to utilize the same techniques for building web based apps, and easily translate them to the TV experience.

Another app we are working on for GoogleTV is PokerFun.tv, which expands on this idea by providing a way to link multiple TVs in different households into one social experience. In PokerFun, the TV acts as the poker table, and players use their mobile devices to hold their cards and place their bets. Here’s a video overview of how it works.

The social and interactive nature of the web translates seamlessly to the TV living room experience, especially when combined with the power of using mobile devices as controllers and companions to the TV. We particularly like the Google TV platform for our apps because it gives us a way to link multiple devices to the TV, plus a full web browser to build on.

We think the future of TV apps will be one where mobile devices play a critical role, so we’ll be continuously updating our lineup of multi-device apps for Google TV. We’re just getting started and excited about where the platform is headed and there’s no doubt the connected TV space is heating up.

Alan Queen - CTO and Founder of MOVL

Redux for Google TV - Discover socially curated and leanback TV

Guest post by Redux

When our Google TV arrived, we were giddy - the living room TV is one of the last digital screens in our lives to be connected to the Internet, and it’s the screen where we watch the most video. There are many great video repositories we use to watch video on Google TV such as YouTube, Vimeo and Netflix, but with millions of incredible videos available we didn’t know where to start. We liked that our cable provider programmed live TV into a manageable number of channels, and we envisioned a curated web video experience for the living room.
Redux for Google TV leverages the talents of your friends, interesting curators, and influencers to help you discover videos you’ll love. Redux feels like the traditional veg-out TV we’ve all come to love - videos play continuously, and you can flip between channels using the up/down arrow

As you discover channels or curators you like, add them and they’ll appear on your homepage for easy access. Once you start using Redux your homepage will quickly fill with your favorite channels and curators.

Looking for something new? Browse a guide of channels curated by passionate influencers and tastemakers:

We’ll continue to introduce brand new curated channels on a weekly basis and we’re excited to have Thrillist and GreeneStreet Films as launch partners. Both are incredible content creators as well as curators, and will help us realize our vision of using social curation to drive an incredible video discovery experience you can now enjoy from the convenience of your couch on Google TV in the Google TV Spotlight gallery.

We’re just getting started. Let us know what you think in the comments section below.

David McIntosh, Redux founder and CEO