In the Spotlight: Android's Erick Tseng

Now that the first handset based on Google's Android operating system has been out for more than a month, the company will begin offering developers a payment scheme with an important bonus: Google won't take any of the profit. Starting in the first quarter of 2009, Android will support paid apps, with 70% of revenue going to developers and 30% going to carriers and to cover costs. Erick Tseng, lead product manager for Android, spoke with Telephony Associate News Editor Sarah Reedy about Google's game plan.

On why Google doesn't need app revenue: Developers ought to be rewarded for the time and resources they put into building these really great apps, and what Google should do is help foster that environment then focus on what we do best, which is advertising and monetization. We will help provide developers tools for leveraging our ad platform to monetize through ads, and that is how we'll make our own money.

On learning from YouTube: There are 13 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube per minute — something crazy like that. There is tons of content, but people keep going back because they are finding good stuff. How do they find it? Because they have really good search, but also because they're depending on the community to rate content, to comment on it. That helps in populating and percolating really good stuff to the top of your Web searches. We saw that happening on YouTube and said we definitely want to have that for our market as well. So the more content we have, the more ratings and reviews we hope to get as well. That will then help organize content in a way that users can find really high-quality stuff on Android Market.

On Android's road map: We are really excited about the G1 because it's the first actual piece of hardware consumers can buy, but at the end of the day, we are so excited about Android because it's a platform strategy. By focusing on the platform and letting our partners build handsets on top of it, we can scale pretty quickly.