Besides new consumer services, Google announced several new developer initiatives at Google I/O 2013, its ongoing annual developer conference at Moscone Center, San Francisco. Here is a quick lowdown on all the announcements: Google Play Services: Google introduced several new APIs for Android developers as part of a new Google Play Services update. For the uninitiated, Google Play Services allows app developers to make use of various Google services like Google Maps and Google+ among others within their apps. Among the new APIs announced include new version of Google Maps Android API, improved Google Cloud Messaging APIs and Google+ Sign In APIs. Google announced three new location APIs - Fused Location Provider which uses a new low power location finding mode that apparently uses less than one percent of battery per hour, Geofencing which allows developers to define virtual boundaries for a real-world geographic area and setup location-based trigger actions and Activity recognition which allows developers to use the device's accelerometer data and machine learning to detect user activities like walking, driving and biking among others. Google also rolled out an improved cross platform Google+ single sign on mechanism, which works similar to the Facebook and Twitter single sign on mechanisms but also prompts users to automatically download and install the Android app on their tablet and phone through Play Store. The company has introduced API tools to allow developers make cross-client authentication and authorization, particularly between Android and web apps. Google Cloud Messaging: It introduced new features for Google Cloud Messaging like support for persistent connections from your servers, upstream messaging to send data from app to servers and the…
