Watching the leaks about Google's Open Handset Alliance

11:15am EST and the Open Handset Alliance website is (finally) live.

I'm subject to an NDA, so I've just watched the leaks without comment.  The Wall Street Journal carried the first news almost a week in advance, but without any mention of the name Open Handset Alliance.

I began intermittently checking the results of a Google search on the complete phrase "Open Handset Alliance" in anticipation of leaks in advance of the actual announcement.  Up through Friday, there were zero hits.  Likewise on Saturday morning, at least for a web search, but a Google news search returned the first hit.  It was this from CNET News at 6:25pm Pacific time on Friday evening.  From the text, they may have gotten their information from someone in Japan.

By Sunday midday, the conventional Google web search was returning this one article from Friday midnight (Pacific time) which credited the CNET News story from earlier that evening.  However, a Google news search gave the CNET article directly (as the 3rd item) with two more recent articles above it.  This situation remained stable through Sunday evening (eastern US time).  But by Sunday evening, there were 24 blog posts tagged "Open Handset Alliance" on Technorati.  They all traced back to the CNET News or an alternate copy of the same story.  Finally, sometime between 7pm and 9pm Sunday evening, Google must have updated their database as suddenly they were reporting 14,900 hits for the complete phrase "Open Handset Alliance."  By Monday morning this was 31,200.

Sunday also saw a New York Times background article – an in depth article about Andy Rubin (the lead for the OHA software project) that had obviously been set up with cooperation from Google.   As a cooperative venture, this article did not mention the term "Open Handset Alliance."

So across all the noise, it appears there were only two significant leaks:

1. On Tuesday the 30th, the Wall Street Journal said the announcement would come within two weeks and gave quite a few details.  Then on Thursday the 1st, they pinned it down to Monday the 5th.
2. On Friday the 2nd, CNET News broke the name "Open Handset Alliance."

Rather impressive secrecy for an effort involving more than 30 companies.

Comments

[Nuance]

“Nuance joined the Open Handset Alliance with other industry leaders to grow the entire mobile ecosystem,” said Steve Chambers, president, mobile and consumer services division, Nuance Communications. “We’re committed to apply our strength and leadership in voice-based search and messaging to move the market forward. By packaging and optimizing embedded speech technology components for open source distribution, we’ve given developers the opportunity to access speech solutions through open APIs using the Android platform and to easily upgrade to new, more advanced speech features as well. We believe deep collaboration with members of the Alliance will grow our core mobile business and fuel the proliferation of speech-enabled applications worldwide.”