It’s Sunday which means it’s time for another installment of The Business of Google, an exclusive feature to Androidspin.com

Quadroid = Wintel?
What’s this cool word? Well it’s a mesh of Qualcomm and Android.  Qualcomm held their annual investor day on November 17th. During this meeting they echoed the likes of HTC, Motorola, Kyocera, LG and Samsung agreeing that Android has been great for their business.  Analysts are starting to use the word “Quadroid” to describe the partnership between Qualcomm and Manufacturers as it pertains to their Android handsets.

Qualcomm has been seen as the leader in the mobile semi-conductor business for almost a decade and Android has been catching on like wildfire. Last year 3.5% of the world’s smartphones were running Android; that number is now 25% and more than three quarters of those handsets are using Qualcomm chips.

Upon the news of Qualcomm’s results and partnership with Android handset manufacturers, both Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse gave Qualcomm stock a BUY rating. The only downside to all of this great Androidness is that analysts are speculating with the onslaught of Android devices available by multiple carriers, it’s going to hedge the margin for manufacturers from 30-35% to 10%

Source: CNN Money and The Reformed Broker

Google TV
Sony dropped the price of their Sony Internet with Google TV Blu Ray player from $399 to $299. No not just a holiday price cut by different big boxes, the actual MSRP from their website to their vendors dropped 25%. The Android naysayers were quick to speculate a signal to the end of Google TV. The reality may actually be with Blu Ray players available under $100 this holiday season putting a value of an extra $200 on the Google TV portion may be a little far fetched at retail.

Google TV has seen all four major networks block access to their internet streams.  While you can still access show and network websites and social media, the actual streaming sites are blocked.  One of the key features to a consumer (rather than a tech enthusiast) is the ability to search for a program and watch the live feed, interact with the show and watch previous or archived episodes housed on network websites. This was a seamless process at the unveiling event October 12 in New York (which we attended), however networks blocking the streaming content has put a kink in that.

Android Journalist Russell Holly, as well as others, have speculated that it’s no big deal that the networks have blocked access to the streams and that the real meat in Google TV will be the app market. Once the app market is available (Q1 2011) developers for the networks will start adding apps to view their streams which will allow for a monetization of sorts and back end data to be provided to the networks for better delivery of advertising and offers.

Source: My Brain

Chrome OS
Chrome OS did an about face late this week.  It was reported last week that Chrome OS wouldn’t make their forecasted entry into the market via laptops by OEM partners like ASUS and HP.  The news for Chrome OS may have gotten better though as several websites have reported that two Google branded netbooks will be available before the end of the year.  These two Google branded netbooks will be manufactured by a third party manufacturer and have been code named Mario and Andretti.

The clever names come from the fact that Chrome OS is a very efficient lightweight OS which will make it fast, really fast. One of the features of Chrome OS will be an almost instant start up skipping the minutes of waiting for a computer to boot without having it be in a “hibernate” state. This is a result of the size of the OS and that most of Chrome OS is based on the cloud.

Source: Thedroidguy

Google Wave Getting A Second Wave of Life
People that work together from different parts of the country and the world, especially lots of bloggers, are rejoicing in the news that the Google Wave project may not be dead.  It was reported earlier this fall that Google had pulled the plug on Google Wave, now it seems that the Google Wave team have submitted Google Wave to the Apache Incubator.

You may have been one of those people that were starving for a Google Wave invite or maybe you bought one on eBay, only to start using the service and saying “Now what”? Or you may be one of the hundreds of online journalists or bloggers that use the site everyday to track who’s working on what and planning out projects. Whatever your take on Wave is, it was released in 2009 without the fanfare expected. Perhaps because they took the word “Beta” off of it.

On the news of Google’s giving up on Wave, the creator of Wave and Google Maps, Lars Rasmussen, left Google for greener pastures at Facebook.  Meanwhile the rest of the Google Wave Team announced they were open-sourcing wave and calling it “Wave in a box”. Programmers from Novell and others joined the project and submitted it to the Apache Software Foundation. A vote by the foundation on the life of the project is expected in the coming weeks.

Source: Venture Beat and PC World