Liz Gannes

Earlier in June, Apple made its big pitch to developers, describing an integrated, seamless user experience built around its platforms, devices and services. Now it’s Google’s turn to do the same thing.

At its upcoming annual I/O developer conference, Google will tout the latest updates to Android and Chrome, and the growing variety of devices on which they run, as the foundation of a continuous user experience across devices. More so than ever, Google and Apple’s versions of the connected life are colliding.

A fight that broke out in your pockets has spilled over onto the wrist, into the living room and out to the car.

Both companies want to convince app developers that theirs is the best way to reach millions of users around the world. But the two tech giants are coming from very different places.

In the smartphone age, Apple has succeeded by providing a cohesive ecosystem built around the tight integration of hardware and software, with a curated set of applications and services that run on it. Meanwhile, Google has made Android the world’s most popular smartphone operating system by allowing any handset manufacturer to roll out its own version.

Google said it had bought Skybox Imaging, a company that provides high-resolution photos using satellites, for $500 million in cash.

Google explained the deal as such: “Their satellites will help keep our maps accurate with up-to-date imagery. Over time, we also hope that Skybox’s team and technology will be able to help improve Internet access and disaster relief -- areas Google has long been interested in.”

Skybox provides sub-meter images as well as 90-second videos from its network of small satellites. It points them at specific spots to provide analytics about how they change over time.

Applications listed on its website include monitoring agriculture for the purpose of identifying pest infestations, modeling insurance by checking in on assets, informing commodity traders with updates about oil storage, and tracking ships and container activity in ports to analyze supply chains.

Mary Meeker, the late-stage investor at Kleiner Perkins and longtime Internet analyst, presented the 2014 edition of her annual trends report at the Code Conference.

She observed that while huge growth spurts in people getting online and using smartphones may be ending, people really love to use the Internet from their phones, and that’s only growing faster.

According to data from various sources gathered by Meeker and her team, the total number of Internet users in the world is growing less than 10 percent per year and slowing. The number of smartphone users is growing 20 percent per year but also slowing.

Having taken pictures of more than 6 million miles’ worth of road, Google is more than doubling the amount of global Street View imagery by adding all of its archive photography.

The company’s Google Maps Web application will now include a time machine feature where users can move a slider to see all historical images of a place. As much as possible, pictures of the same place have been aligned so they have the same perspective as one another.

That doesn’t mean you’ll be able to move the slider back and forth to see historical images of Rome compared to the present day ruins -- Street View imagery only goes back eight years, at most. But it does mean you’ll be able to play with some recent history, like the building of the Freedom Tower in Lower Manhattan, the building of the 2014 World Cup stadium in Fortaleza, Brazil, and the destruction left by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Onagawa, Japan.

As it prepares to go public, the Sina spinoff Weibo is pitching itself as a “mobile first” product with 70 percent of users accessing the social media service from phones and 22 percent of total revenue in 2013 from mobile advertising.

Weibo is hoping to raise $437 million in a Nasdaq listing, according to a recent filing. Weibo has 143.8 million monthly active users, with $188.3 million of revenue for a loss of $38.1 million in 2013.

Though Weibo is perhaps a little too old -- it started in 2009 -- to be a true mobile-only product, mobile is one of the stronger stories the company is telling.

Weibo has been hurt recently by challenges to user growth including competition from Tencent’s mobile messaging service WeChat (though Weibo still serves a need as more of a public tool), as well as rising government censorship, including arrests of prominent Weibo personalities like investor Charles Xue, which was perceived by many as a form of government intimidation of critics. The company said in its filing that growth has also been hurt by recent government identity verification requirements.

National Security Agency Deputy Director Rick Ledgett called former contractor Edward Snowden’s release of documents about his agency’s surveillance programs “inappropriate” and “arrogant” in a video interview from Fort Meade (MD), beamed into the TED conference in Vancouver.

But he acknowledged that the outcry around the Snowden revelations has led the NSA to try to be more transparent.

“The vulnerabilities we find, the overwhelming majority we disclose to the people who are responsible for manufacturing or developing those products,” Ledgett said. “We’re actually working on a proposal right now to be transparent and to publish transparency reports in the same way the Internet companies do.”

Google CEO Larry Page was hesitant to tell the world about the medical condition that was hurting his ability to speak, but publicly sharing his voice troubles helped him realize the value of openness.

Thousands of people with similar conditions replied to him online. If people could only share their medical records anonymously -- and if research doctors could find them online and connect to the patients -- Page estimates that 100,000 lives could be saved in 2014. That same premise should apply to online privacy, Page said.

“I’m just very worried that with Internet privacy, we’re doing the same thing we’re doing with medical records, we’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater. We’re not thinking about the tremendous good that can come from people sharing the right information with the right people in the right ways.”