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While Google Inc.’s Android software is most commonly associated with smartphones and tablets, around every corner on the CES showroom floor companies were busy showing off something new — a television, a washing machine or a kitchen appliance, each running the search engine giant’s malleable software.

In a little more than three years since the launch of the first Android smartphone, Google’s mobile platform has skyrocketed in popularity, and now accounts for roughly half of all the smartphones sold around the world.

Having conquered one world, Google’s Android platform now faces another more daunting set of challenges, as the company’s primary objective shifts from one of finding relevance to one of managing and capitalizing on dominance — strategic changes that are reflective of the larger evolution taking place within the company.

Since taking the helm as chief executive officer last April, Google co-founder Larry Page has been busy charting a new, more aggressive course for the Silicon Valley titan, designed to place Google in a position from which to better combat the new realities of the social Web and the rising threats of Apple Inc. and Facebook Inc. The Mountain View, Calif.-based must now confront the fragmentation of the Android ecosystem, the optics of its acquisition of Motorola and the rising spectre of Microsoft’s Windows Phone software.

“It really has gone from a startup mode to having a big responsibility,” Hiroshi Lockheimer, vice-president of engineering for Android, said in an interview in Las Vegas. “We are impacting many different people. The end users, the people who are buying these phones, we’re in their pockets and that’s a very big responsibility … Then of course there’s our responsibility to the industry; there are companies that have made huge bets on the platform and we want to make sure that we shepherd the platform along in such a way that ensures its success and ensures the success of those partners and the application developers.”