Take a look back at our live coverage of Google’s flagship conference, which started at 9am PT Wednesday. We’re not expecting as major a news event as we have in past years, but there will be no shortage of updates to the company’s plans for Android, Chrome, YouTube, and its cloud-computing services. We’ll have a full contingent of GigaOM reporters at the show bringing you updates both here and throughout the course of the day, so stay tuned.

So far, Google has announced:

• 900 million Android activations
• Three new Google Maps location APIs
• Synced Google Cloud Messaging accounts, which will let you sync notifications across devices.
• New Google Play Game Services features that can do multiplayer gaming through Google+
• Android Studio, a new development environment for Android app developers.
• A new design for the Google Play app store that highlights tablet apps.
• Google Play Music All Access, a subscription music service.
• A new educational initiative involving Android tablets and apps for education.
• Sweeping updates to Google+, including a new stream design.
• Conversational search within Chrome.
• Big changes to Google Maps.

While it might not feature anything as crazy as last year’s Google Glass-streamed skydive over downtown San Francisco, if you love (or love to hate) Google’s world, here’s what you can expect this week. We’ll update this post as new stories are posted.

Day 3:

• The GigaOM Show: Google I/O themes and takeways that affect you
• The future, according to Google
• Some of the best articles you need to read about Google I/O
• A sneak peek at YouTube’s future as it rolls out new channel design for everyone
• Redbox Instant is coming to Google TV soon, Roku up next

Day 2:

• So Google Compute Engine is out, your move Amazon
• Google, NASA quantum computing project could bring stronger machine learning to the masses
• SMS integration coming to Google Hangouts. Will Google Voice follow?
• Google CEO Larry Page: Do as I say, not as I do
• How Google Music wants to take on Spotify, Rdio and Rhapsody
• Google jumpstarts Glass development with apps form Twitter, Facebook and Evernote
• What do good shoes, Google+ and Facebook have in common?
• How Google cleverly improved Android without releasing Android 4.3 at Google I/O
• The road less traveled: How Google does Streetview for the world’s oceans
• Why Google thinks the GPU is the engine for the web of the future

Day 1:

• Live blog: Google I/O 2013 showcases Android, Chrome, YouTube and more
• Google I/O statshot: 900 million Android devices activated
• Google Apps set for a communication upgrade with deeper Google+ integration
• Google officially launches its music subscription service at Google I/O
• Google turns up location data usage on Android apps
• What Google was thinking when redesigning the new Google+
• Prepaid gives Google a huge Android boost (and Apple has noticed)
• Eight years later, Google reinvents its Maps for a data rich web
• Coming to a school near you: Google launches Android app store for education
• How Google is setting the new search standard with voice and knowledge graph
• Google TV will receive Android 4.2.2 update as well as latest version of Chrome
• And, bam! Here’s Google Compute Engine
• Google’s growing cloud just got a NoSQL database
• Here’s the real theme of Google I/O: Service unification between Chrome and Android
• Why the snap of a photo changed my mind about Google Glass
• Google gains appeal for cloud services, but there’s this company called Amazon

Pre-show expectations:

• Why the time has come for Android @Home to finally make a splash
• Google I/O: Arming for the battle of the public cloud stars
• What to expect for Chrome and Android at Google I/O 2013
• Where to watch Google I/O 2013 live online
• Reports: Google will launch music subscription service at I/O

Publishers Lunch points out that much of the financial analysis in the report of the proposed buyout is inaccurate: Among other things, while the report says a $1 billion purchase price is “well below the price it had originally bought in at,” Publishers Lunch notes that because of the way the original investment was structured, this price would actually represent a small premium. Nonetheless, if the documents are legit (the NYT says they are, but appear to be a few weeks old), it’s worth thinking about what Microsoft wants with the Nook business. Barnes & Noble shares were up 23 percent in pre-market trading this morning.

A reading ecosystem for Windows 8

It’s not surprising that Microsoft reportedly has no interest in Barnes & Noble’s tablets, which have never taken off. In fact, as of last week, the Nook HD and HD+ incorporate a full host of Google services, including Google Play, Gmail and the Chrome browser. While B&N has claimed it is committed to the Android platform and to the tablet business overall, Microsoft obviously has no incentive to keep a line of poorly performing Android tablets up and running.

What Microsoft does need is a reading ecosystem for its Surface tablets and other Windows 8 devices. That’s why the company bought a stake in Nook in the first place, but so far it hasn’t resulted in much more than a Nook app for Windows 8 (released after Amazon launched its own Kindle for Windows 8 app). With full control over the Nook ecosystem, Microsoft can take advantage of some of the technology — including book discovery and “scrapbooking” features — that Barnes & Noble has built for these devices without being dragged down by the devices themselves. It would also presumably get access to Nook’s ebook publisher relationships, which lie with Nook Media, not with Barnes & Noble.

A pre-existing customer base to compete against Amazon and Apple

The buyout could also help Microsoft compete against Amazon and Apple. Kindle is still the leading e-reading platform, and Apple’s share of the e-reading market is small, but growing, especially when it comes to heavily illustrated and interactive titles. While there is no guarantee that Microsoft can become a leader in e-reading, it has a better chance of doing so if it harnesses an existing platform and customer base and then extends it to Windows users worldwide, rather than attempting to build a system from scratch.

A caveat is that Nook hasn’t managed to grow its market share against Kindle. It’s been stuck around 25 percent since 2011. But that’s better than the zero that Microsoft has now. “They can afford it as a bet, even if it is a long shot,” Peter McCarthy, the founder of book publishing consultancy McCarthy Digital, told me. “Microsoft is awful with content and know it. They’re  always looking for another Xbox, though.”

MoPub Mobile Advertising Marketplace Report Q1 2013

MoPub, which is an ad-serving platform for mobile app publishers, found the iPhone was the strongest performer during the quarter; the report says the share of ad buying on Apple phones increased 12 percent between January and March. The iPad experienced a drop-off in spending in February but rebounded a bit in March.

The share of Android tablet spending was negligible at less than 1 percent, according to MoPub. Android phones, which took about a quarter of all mobile ad spending, saw the reverse pattern from the iPad: spending on the platform increased in February before dipping back down in March. MoPub explains that “In Q1 2013, many ad buyers discovered the increase in user value on Android devices was offset by a poor conversion rate of users from these ads.”

As for the kinds of ads being placed, things swung more toward interactive ads, with the share of spending on them growing from 15.7 percent to 79.1 percent during the quarter.

Keep appears to be Google’s answer to Apple’s Notes feature, which rolled out a web version last year. It could also serve as a basic, mobile to-do-list service for people who generally make notes on more complex services like Evernote and Workflowy.

According to a post on the Google blog:

With Keep you can quickly jot ideas down when you think of them and even include checklists and photos to keep track of what’s important to you. Your notes are safely stored in Google Drive and synced to all your devices so you can always have them at hand.

Users can also record voice memos. Those who don’t have Android phones can “access, edit and create new notes on the web at http://drive.google.com/keep and in the coming weeks you’ll be able to do the same directly from Google Drive.”

Google Play is a rebrand of the Android Market, intended to remind users that Google sells content besides apps. So far, success has been mixed. When it comes to ebooks, for example, Google hasn’t been able to compete with Amazon or even Apple; its share of the ebook market is likely in the single digits, and while 5 million ebooks sounds high, a lot of those are free public domain titles. And as our Erica Ogg wrote recently, while the number of Android apps has grown quickly, developers almost never choose to develop for Android before or instead of iOS.

Google is taking some steps to bring more users to the store. It started offering gift cards and a wishlist feature last year. Today it’s running sales on a bunch of content — $5 ebooks, some 99-cent movie rentals and other promotions.

To get the 2013 version of the app, iOS users simply have to download the update in the App Store — no need to download a whole new app. Returning Android users will have a choice depending on the app they have installed. If you had the app called At Bat, you just need to look for the update; if you had the At Bat ’12 app, you’ll have to look for a new app to download. (I’ll update this story with the direct link as soon as the app goes live.)

The app is free, but to unlock access to live games for the 2013 season and World Series, it requires a one-time in-app purchase $19.99 subscription fee — or iOS users can pay in month installments of $2.99. However, as with last year’s version, subscribers to the league’s MLB.TV subscription plan for watching games online can get At Bat 13 for free.

Last year’s online and mobile video bundling deal resulted in downloads of the 2012 season app hitting 7 million, which surpassed the downloads during the 2010 and 2011 seasons combined.

This year, At Bat is again offering some cost-saving deals for subscribers that should juice downloads. Previously, fans had to pay separately for access to the mobile app as well as live game audio through the MLB.TV desktop website, but At Bat 13 subscribers will now get GameDay Audio (MLB.TV’s most popular feature) for free. And for subscribers who may own both iOS and Android devices: one subscription works on any platform now; you no longer have to pay for access on each.

Major League Baseball’s Advanced Media — whose CEO, Bob Bowman, will be speaking at our paidContent Live event in April – runs all of the league’s digital properties. And MLBAM made big strides this year in incorporating more news video and its historical video content into its mobile apps. Game highlight video will now be embedded in news stories in the app. More than 70 classic archived games dating back to the 1952 World Series will also be accessible, and the whole of MLB’s video highlights are finally searchable — it previously went back to just 2008. Stats are also playing a bigger part of the user experience: tablet users will now have access to sortable batting, pitching and fielding statistics.

Though it’s not yet ready, a version of At Bat for Blackberry 10 will arrive by Opening Day, I’m told.

This story was updated at 9:04 a.m. PT with a link to the iOS app.

Craigslist gets over 50 billion page views and over 60 million U.S. visitors every month — yet the classified site’s design and mobile strategy appear stuck in the year 2000 (when it first expanded beyond San Francisco). Craigslist offers a barebones mobile view, and it’s recently rolled out some mobile-friendly features like a map view and an image-heavy grid view. But it’s never released its own smartphone or tablet app, and its API is closed.

Plenty of companies have stepped in to try to fill the void, and the most recent of those is Mokriya, a consulting company that has worked on apps for companies like Hipster.

Mokriya’s new Craigslist app for iPhone and Android, which launches Wednesday morning, and is called Mokriya Craigslist, joins third-party Craigslist apps like Craigslist Mobile and c•Mobile. What sets Mokriya Craigslist apart, the company says, is its easily navigable “two-tap” interface and the fact that it’s officially licensing data from Craigslist. The basic version is free; a premium version that allows posting and other features is $0.99.

When you launch the Mokriya Craigslist app, you choose category and city. Listings are then presented in an image-heavy interface. “Browsing Craigslist should be as pleasurable as using Pinterest,” Mokriya founder Sunil Kanderi told me.

To choose a new category, post a listing of your own or ‘favorite’ a listing; all you have to do is tap at the top of the screen. “We built this to solve the problem of having to browse through multiple categories,” Kanderi said. Users can also create alerts so that they’re notified when, say, an apartment that fits their criteria is listed. And the app can use GPS to identify listings near a user’s location. Posting is also streamlined: A user writes a headline and description, chooses photos from his or her camera roll, adds price and category, and that’s it. Browsing listings is free, but to post listings, ‘favorite’ listings or set alerts, you’ll have to pay $0.99 for a premium version. I found a test version of the app smooth and nice to use — which sets it apart from some other unofficial Craigslist apps I’ve tried.

Mokriya officially licensed data from Craigslist prior to building its app. That should help it avoid legal hurdles: In the past, apps that have used Craigslist data without permission have gotten in trouble. This past summer, for example, Craigslist sued apartment search app PadMapper for using its data without a license. Craigslist didn’t answer my question about how many apps it’s licensed its data to (in fact, it didn’t respond to any of my questions for this story), but I imagine that many third-party apps besides Mokriya do have licenses or they’d have gotten cease-and-desist letters by now. (c•Mobile, for instance, notes on its iTunes page that it’s officially licensed.)

Craigslist is also making a little money off Mokriya’s app: “As part of the licensing agreement, Craigslist does get a small revenue cut,” Kanderi told me. “But mostly the licensing agreement ensures that we are in compliance with Craigslist’s terms of use.”

Android phones represented 31 percent of the more than 500 million mobile ad impressions tracked by Opera between October and December across more than 12,000 mobile websites and apps. iPhones, meanwhile, had a 29 percent share of those impressions. Major reasons for Android taking the lead include: the popularity of Android devices in markets where users are more likely to access the internet on a mobile device – like Indonesia and Russian Federation countries, which saw double-digit gains in ad impressions during the quarter — and Samsung’s rapidly growing popularity among smartphone buyers in the U.S.

“In the U.S. we think that this is considerably helped by the emergence of Samsung and the Galaxy S III,” Mahi De Silva, EVP of Opera’s consumer mobile division, said in an interview. “They’re pouring a lot of dollars into the market, and they have favorable pricing with mobile operators, so that entire market has a lot of momentum [toward] adoption of Samsung Android devices.”

Earlier this week we reported that Apple just barely outsold Samsung in the U.S. mobile phone sales during the fourth quarter, but Samsung sold nearly 7 million more devices during all of 2012, according to Strategy Analytics.

Source: Opera Media Works

iPhones are just one piece of the pie, however. When counting iOS’s overall impact, including mobile ads seen on iPod touches and iPads, Opera found that Apple’s devices still represent the largest overall number of impressions, about 42 percent.

And where it really counts — producing revenue for mobile advertisers — iOS is still comfortably in the lead.

“Even though you saw that for the first time Android phones have a larger volume of impressions, the dollars associated is still considerably in favor of Apple and iOS and iPhones,” De Silva said.

iPhones are responsible for 37 percent of the revenue made by mobile advertisers, versus about 30 percent from Android; and just over half of all revenues in the quarter came from some type of iOS device. So in terms of the ability to monetize, De Silva says iOS is still the more attractive platform for advertisers.

Android has a ways to go to catch up in revenue. And even though the platform is only going to grow and add more users, it’s not clear the monetization will catch up nearly as fast, he said. “The trend, as we’ve seen in the past, is iPhone continues to be the most monetization-friendly platform out there.”

I got a demo of Bookish at the company’s trendy, book-filled offices in Manhattan’s Flatiron District last week, and had a chance to use the site further on Monday when it was prematurely available online for several hours as it was being tested. Overall, I think the long-delayed Bookish is off to a promising start.

Bookish has the opportunity to shape book discovery and offers publishers a chance to directly engage with readers. It also allows them to tiptoe into direct sales. I’m less intrigued by the original editorial content: I’m not sure it differentiates itself enough from other book-related content on the web to draw users to the site for the first time. Once those users make their way to the site, though, they’ll find a clean, easy-to-use design, and an algorithm that may well find them their next book — even though it’s limited to less than a quarter of the books on the site for now. Here’s my overview of the site.

 The basics: Books and authors

While only three of the big-six publishers are financially backing the site, the other three — Random House, HarperCollins and Macmillan — are making their books available through it, along with 10 other publishers including Scholastic and Houghton Mifflin. In total, that’s 1.2 million unique titles spanning 18 genres (fiction and literature, children’s, cookbooks, and so on), and 400,000 authors have profile pages. The book pages include basic information, a preview of the first chapter, related news and videos, and a roundup of any “must-read” lists that the book has appeared on (for more on those lists, see below). Each book page also includes purchase links (more on that below, too).

Algorithm-generated book recommendations

Online book discovery is a huge problem for publishers, and Bookish tackles it with a recommendation algorithm that lets users input up to four titles to find what to read next. “We’re very much a technology company,” Karen Sun, an MIT grad (and book blogger) who is heading the company’s recommendation engine, told me. “This is probably the largest venture in the book space, in terms of data.” Sun explained that while Amazon and Goodreads primarily deliver book recommendations based on “collaborative filtering” — namely, a user’s purchasing or rating and reviewing history as well as those of other users — Bookish doesn’t have that user or purchase data yet. Instead, it relies on “deep, introspective” data: “Recommendations are based on the books and understanding of the books.” The recommendation looks at features like the authors, editors and illustrators who contributed to a book, the awards a book has won, and genre and publication date, then layers on a machine-learning component that parses user and professional reviews to try to distill themes, concepts and sentiments. Insights from the editorial team are included, too.

A user who liked The Help, for instance, receives recommendations for Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford — another women’s fiction title that features race relations — and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, a book that, like The Help, includes an aspiring female author. Type in Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and the engine pulled up four similar “big ideas” books, but also two Spanish-language titles that were out of place even if the subject matter was similar (and you’ll see a Spanish-language edition of The Room in the recommendations for The Help above).

For now, Bookish’s recommendation engine works with only about 250,000 of the 1.2 million books on the site. Sun says the engine will improve over time, and will eventually integrate reader reviews and user actions — other books users have looked at and rated on the site.

E-commerce: Essential, but…

Each book on the site can be purchased in print or digital formats directly through Bookish or from another retailer — there are affiliate links to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, IndieBound, Apple and Kobo.

Distributor Baker & Taylor is handling all of Bookish’s direct sales. For now, ebooks purchased through Bookish are only available in EPUB and PDF formats, for reading on iPad, Android, Nook and desktop — no Kindle.

Bookish seems to want to stress that it’s not cutting into other retailers’ sales, even though a serious direct-sales outlet is something that book publishers desperately need.

“We want to be able to say you can buy [a book] here and it’s reasonably priced. We’re not trying to steal sales away from other places,” CEO Khazaei told me. Publishers probably don’t care about taking sales from Amazon, but they may not want to sour relationships with retailers like Barnes & Noble and the independent bookstores represented by IndieBound.

Bookish’s print and ebook prices appeared to match those offered by Amazon, though I wasn’t able to test many titles. Khazaei told me that “I don’t know how the pricing decisions are made, really,” Khazaei said. “I assume [Baker & Taylor] is tracking [prices on other sites] but we just leave it in their hands.” While the site seems like an obvious place for publishers to run special sales on both print and digital books, that doesn’t seem to be a priority for now. Update: Khazaei stressed to me that his lack of involvement with pricing is required by the Department of Justice in order to be compliant with antitrust regulations. (The DOJ sued Hachette, Penguin and Simon & Schuster, along with Macmillan and HarperCollins, last year for allegedly colluding to set ebook prices; Hachette, Penguin and S&S all settled.)

Original editorial content along with the algorithm

Bookish has seven full-time editors who each manage different genres and update those sections daily with original book coverage. The site is also soliciting pieces from well-known authors and other public figures. In one ongoing feature, for instance, editors from The Onion review books. Other editorial features at launch include a column by Eat, Pray, Love author Elizabeth Gilbert and an interview between bestselling thriller authors Michael Connelly and Michael Kortya. In addition to that content, the site’s editors are curating columns and lists of books like “The Biggest BFF Breakups in YA Books” and “Big Ideas.”

Advertising, revenue and partnerships

Bookish is collaborating with USA Today’s books website. Its original editorial content will be syndicated on USA Today’s website, and the technology that Bookish uses to let readers view the first chapter of a book and to offer book recommendations will also be included on USA Today’s site. In exchange, Bookish will feature USA Today’s book bestseller lists on bookish.com.

In addition to book sales, Bookish will get revenue from advertising. For now the site’s ad slots are taken up with books from the three launch partners, but eventually the company will expand advertising to other publishers and to companies from outside the book business. Prior to its launch two years ago, Bookish had announced an advertising and content syndication deal with AOL Huffington Post, but that’s off the drawing board for now. A company spokeswoman told me Bookish is “in discussions about continuing to work with AOL in the future.”

Not a focus: Social, self-publishing

Other publishers can sign an agreement with Bookish to add their titles to the site. (Khazaei told me Bookish doesn’t charge publishers anything to join, but they presumably have to fulfill a number of requirements to be included.) However, self-published authors can’t add their books. “The focus right now is on traditionally published titles,” Khazaei said.

Also at launch, the social features that are a key part of Goodreads’ mission are absent from Bookish. Users can’t friend or follow each other — the focus is on a reader’s individual interests. I found that refreshing: Just because you’re Facebook friends with someone doesn’t mean that he or she shares your book preferences, and I prefer the algorithm-driven approach.