Mfarhanonline Social Media News: Android has a new information hub and its name is Kinoma Play. Unveiled here at SXSW in Austin, TX, Kinoma Play is Marvell's new dashboard-style information, local and social hub that that can run on any Android device running version 2.1 or later (including 4.0, A.K.A Ice Cream sandwich). Downloadable from the Android Mark… pardon me, Google Play , Kinoma Play is more than just a mobile app. Peter Hoddie, VP of Kinoma Platform at Marvell describes it as an application layer. It even has its own open API. Using the free Kinoma Create, developers can write full-blown apps that tap into it, or dashboards for their own apps that plug into the broader Kinoma Play information overview. Kinoma Play’s Android interface includes access to 50 custom apps. It brings together features and information from the apps in five dashboards: News, which displays social updates along with news, stocks and weather Places, which brings in Yelp local data with related info Music, which does not play music, but offers details about the song you’re currently listening to Send, which is your sharing hub Search, which searches across Kinoma Play apps (but not apps outside the Kinoma ecosystem) Hoddie said he's not concerned about Google building its own app hub. "Software is software. If someone wants to do something, there's nothing we can do to stop them." He added, though, that the work Kinoma's 16-person team has done with Android is not trivial or apparently easily replicated. Hoddie also told me that Kinoma does something for developers that Google has yet to do: it opensources the Kinoma Play apps so developers can learn how to better program for the Kinoma interface. He thinks Kinoma Play, which runs on any compatible Android handset, does a better job of differentiating phones from stock Android than some of the ov! erlays w e've seen before (think Samsung's TouchWiz). Plus, Kinoma will eventually go beyond Android. They're working on an iOS version and when they've done more OpenGL work, will port Kinoma Play to tablets with high-rez displays. SEE ALSO: Google Ditches Android Market, Rebrands its Content as Google Play The reality is that Kinoma is about far more than just smartphones. What Hoddie envisions is that this extensible software layer will be portable enough to work on all sorts of Marvell-enabled devices. So if you get, say, a smart-home device running a Marvell CPU, it'll work with the Kinoma Play app (there are already DLNA capabilities in the Kinoma Play platform) or dashboard on your phone. There won't be a need to learn proprietary software. There is also, noted Hoddie, the potential benefit of writing a dashboard for Kinoma Play and instantly getting in front of every user who has the app layer installed. When I reminded Hoddie, who worked at Apple on QuickTime in the mid 1990s, that the Android Market is now called "Google Play" he smiled and said, "Yeah, they did that," adding, "We've been using 'Play' since 2008… and we welcome them to the party." Check out the video to see Kinoma Play in action on a Nexus phone and tell us what you think of the interface in the comments. More About: android , Google Play , smartpones , sxsw Social Media reviews series maintain by Mayya
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